The engines go...... (silence)
It's been a while! Where have you all been?
Oh, right.
So we're thiiiiiiiis close (holds fingers mere millimeters apart) to selling the boat, but before the transaction is complete the buyer wants to have the boat hauled out, pressure-washed, and surveyed. All fair and good requests (and things we had done back when we were in her shoes) but there turned out to be one minor hang-up with getting this dealt with - our engines. They haven't been run in a very long time (hands up if you can guess when the last time was), which I will point out is a very stupid thing to do.
So I went down to the boat, went through the engine start-up mental checklist (power on to the engines, blower on for at least five minutes, fuel valve turned on, pump throttle about twenty times, and turn the key!) which resulted in a lovely 'rrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr' sound as the starter turned but the starboard engine would not fire up. We did a bit of fiddling, checking the fuel quality (still smells good! Er, stinky, but proper) checked the voltage (12.2-ish volts as expected) and did some general fiddling with the lines and hoses and such. Still no luck, and by now we were probably starting to flood the carburetor.
On to the port engine! I flipped the instrument panel on for that side and the first thing I noticed was the voltage readout gauge: 10.7 volts. Strange, especially since both engines are fed by both batteries so the voltage readout should match (and both batteries are constantly trickle-charged when the boat is plugged into shore power, so they're both at capacity.) I tried turning the engine over anyway, since some of those old gauges are kinda lousy. The starter groaned a little, but it acted exactly as if the battery was dead. At that point I turned everything off and decided it was time to bring in the experts.
After a bit of poking around Kristin got a referral from a friend at work who also lives aboard. Even better, his mechanic was available to come down the very next day and poke around. Corey (the mechanic) met me at the boat the next morning (Wednesday) and had a look around, starting with all the same simple tests I had tried before concluding something was bad inside the starboard engine. He pulled the spark plugs and found water in the fuel mixture in a few of them, suggesting that the head gasket might have gone bad. Luckily boat engines are much easier to take apart and work around than car engines, so although it required a fair bit of disassembly the entire thing can be done on-site. At the same time we discovered that the bearings in that engine's alternator were also about to fail, so since the port starter needed to go in for service that was sent along with it. There were a few other basic problems (crappy automotive hose, a defective coolant gasket, mis-matched spark plugs...) but nothing particularly scary-looking... mostly just shoddy past maintenance.
Yesterday he got the remainder of the upper engine block disassembled and discovered that the gasket wasn't at fault; instead the primary fault lies in a check-valve that is supposed to keep sea water out of the main system. This valve had failed after many years of service, and allowed water to seep into some of the cylinders. There's some rust and crud in them, but thankfully the lake is freshwater so the damage isn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Additionally, one of the shafts is bent to nearly a right-angle, which means the engine has probably been operating on five cylinders for quite a while since that appeared to be old damage.
Thus far that is where things stand. With everything disassembled and a lot of dirty water and coolant in the bilge things certainly look like a mess, but he remains optimistic we're going to have the engines running again quite soon. Right now most of the delay is with third parties who are doing some machine work, testing the starter, cleaning the rusted up cylinder, etc. I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow when I go down to replace a jammed-up deck fill (think of it as the equivalent of the gas cap on your car, but for fuel, water or waste on a boat.)