EASY ELECTRIC BOAT MAINTENANCE PART TWO: SHAFT COUPLING REPLACEMENT

One of the hardest areas to work around when BIANKA had the Westerbeke diesel was the stuffing box. Because the boat had a V Drive transmission the prop shaft ran under the engine and transmission:

Trying to get two wrenches to adjust the stuffing box was not in the category of what I would call fun. There was hardly enough room to move the tools because of the tight space:

Just looking at these old pictures of the limited space and the grime gives me the shakes.  That all changed once I put in the Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system. Now access to the stuffing box for adjustment is no longer problematic as it was with the diesel:

The area is easy to get to and open and which means there is a lot of range to use the wrenches for adjustment. Best of all it is clean!  Capt. Mike is very happy about that. As I mentioned I've gone five years without a lot of maintenance on the system including the stuffing box once the initial adjustments were done.
I think part of the reason is because there is so little vibration when using an electric motor for auxilary propulsion there is little need to adjust or replace the packing around the shaft when compared to the vibration of operating a diesel engine. But, since this is a standard stuffing box and not one of the newer Dripless Shaft Seal type stuffing boxes that does not mean they won't drip a little bit. Indeed that is what they are supposed to do to make sure the packing is lubricated and not compacted to tightly around the shaft. 


 When I purchased my electric propulsion system five years ago. I had the distributor at the time provide me with a shaft coupler to connect the motor with the prop shaft. Unfortunately, the one he provided was made of steel but, not stainless steel. Since I was new to the idea of electric propulsion I trusted his choice. Here are the couplings side by side:

 Well, five years of drips from the stuffing box had started to rust one end of the original steel shaft coupling. Now there's a saying that "rust is natures Loctite" and it may perform that function for awhile but, it won't do that forever. Which brings me to why I'm doing this maintenance sooner rather than later.

 The fact is a stainless steel coupling would have been a better choice to connect the stainless steel shafts of the motor and prop. I decided that removing the motor would allow better access to the coupling and since removing the electric motor is easy and weighs only about 45 lbs it was a no-brainer. I just removed the four screws and two bolts shown in the previous post and lifted the motor away from the bracket :

Access to work on  the rusted coupling was now even better:

I was hoping that I would be able to remove the eight bolts holding the two piece shaft coupling to the shafts easily just using a ratchet with the proper allen head bit:

But, unfortunately despite spraying the bolts with PB Blaster  over several weeks I was only able to remove four of the bolts with the ratchet.  I guess it's true that "rust is natures Locktite" after all. Oh well time to take out the Dremel Tool  and cut through the rusted bolts in the coupling with a  Dremel reinforced cut-off wheel.

 and remove the old coupling:

Here is an inside view of the removed rusted coupling:   

and a look at the stainless steel replacement:

Once to old shaft coupling was off I cleaned the shafts with some denatured alcohol and heavy duty paper towel and clamped on the new coupling and torqued it down:

CAPT. MIKE NOTE: Before I put the screws in the coupling I coated the threads with Ultra Tef-Gel  which will help prevent any future corrosion issues and make it easy to remove the coupling in the future without having to use a Dremel tool to cut the through the screws. 

Once that was done it was a simple process of putting the motor back onto the frame. I tightened the two bolts and four screws and the motor was mounted ready to be hooked up to the controller:

Well, that was an easy repair and I did not have to contort and squeeze my six foot two inch frame into positions and spaces it was not meant to be in. I did the entire motor removal and coupling replacement while remaining inside the main cabin of BIANKA.  There was no need to empty the cockpit lockers and squeeze through a hatch like when I had the diesel on board. It's just another reason why I love my Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system.
Since I had already removed the motor . It seemed like a time to check out the motor after five years of use. I'll show that in a future post.

EASY ELECTRIC BOAT MAINTENANCE PART ONE

GOING ELECTRIC PART 13: Motor on!

At this point the diesel has been removed, the area cleared out of any unnecessary items, the stringers have been extended and cut, brackets and motor mounts have been installed. It almost is anti climatic how easy it was to install the motor. But, here it is:

Below is an overhead view. You can see the tabs where the wires will be connected and also the stuffing box through which the prop shaft travels. Speaking of the prop shaft....

Below is a photo of the original V drive transmission setup from the diesel days. The prop shaft ran under the transmission and engine. This made for some difficult maintenance issues of the stuffing box.

Below is a photo of what it looked like underneath the transmission. There was not a lot of room underneath to try and loosen the stuffing box nut. This made changing the packing in the stuffing box very difficult. It was also out of sight. You can also see the corrosion on the transmission flange from salt water that dripped on it over the years . The conversion to electric propulsion has made changing the packing a much easier procedure.

With the electric motor installed (below) the stuffing box is out in the open and much easier to get to compared to the photo above. This will make adjustment very easy. But, there is no free lunch. I will have to remove the Stafford coupling that connects the motor shaft to the prop shaft to replace the packing but, since it too is easily accessible and removable it is a much better setup from a maintenance standpoint.

I am very pleased with the installation. But, it is useless without some of the other components. Most importantly the batteries. So it's time to move on to the next phase which is installing the batteries, controller other components.

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