Thursday the 11th of March, 2010
MUFFLER IN DAY
Drove to the marina this morning to fit the new muffler in it's place and measure for the connecting hose. A beautiful day, Warming up and the frogs were out. I think Spring just might be here in Virginia.
I got on the boat and proceeded to measure, figure and remeasure the hose lengths to connect the 90º elbows, muffler and the existing hose. It was a good time to paint the exhaust elbow on the engine.
Apparently someone replaced the exhaust elbow on the engine and didn't paint it. So, I wire bushed it, wiped it off with lacquer thinner and sprayed it with RustOleum inhibiter and after that flashed off, RustOleum Regal Red paint. That is the Lehman red color!. While the paint dried I headed to American Diesel ( http://www.amerdsl.com ) to get the hose cut to my measured lengths. Brian was much less sick. I informed him that the muffler was the last thing to fix on the engine. We did discuss a 2nd alternator for the inverter batteries. I'll wait and see if that becomes necessary.
After returning to the boat it was relatively simple to hook the hoses together now double clamped. The mounting studs are inside the base of the new muffler, but with large fender washers over the studs they grab the base of the new muffler. So, securing the new muffler has worked out without having to drill new holes.
The moment of truth now. Let's start the engine and check for exhaust leaks. Turned the fuel valve on at the Racor and gave the engine a crank. It didn't immediately start. I checked all the tank valves and hit the manual primer on the lift pump a few strokes. Tried the starter and the Lehman came alive. Great to hear that sound. I had one small exhaust leak and readjusted and tightened the clamp. A good day!
So, other things. I had unhooked the shore power cord to let the inverter work and see how the batteries held up. It worked all day long with the light load I had on 120V. So I got out the 1500w hair dryer and watched the 12V drop to ~ 10.75 while running the hair dryer. You have to realize that in a 100% efficiency this would cause the inverter batteries to put 125 AMPs. The inverter is not 100% efficient so the amp draw is probably more like 150amps while that hair dryer is running. That's tough even with golf cart deep cycle batteries. I threw the switch that connects the inverter battery in parallel with the house battery while the engine was running. When running the hairdryer, I saw the engine amp meter go to ~40 amps. As soon as I cut the hairdryer off, the amps dropped back slowly to ~ 15amps. This is perfect. When a short large demand is placed on the inverter batteries, the engine alternator should be able to recover the batteries in time.
That's all for now.