1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Installing the Port Engine II

After setting up the gantry, cutting off the original engine beds, and sending the original Cummins engine mounts off for modification, I’m ready to finish the port engine installation. It’s going a lot quicker than the starboard engine installation…lots of lessons learned there.

Before: inner rear engine mount needed machining

Rear engine mount with slot relocated to fit the Roamer

Rear engine bed parts made from 3/8″ thick aluminum angle

My Shopsmith Mark V table saw with the band saw and 12″ disk sander attachments made quick work of manufacturing the engine beds. It’s really nice to be able to use woodworking tools when machining aluminum, and the Shopsmith packs a lot of different tools into a small footprint.

Aluminum engine bed bonded with West System epoxy thickened with aluminum powder and cabosil

Front engine bed cut from 3/8″ aluminum angle

Filthy engine bilge needs some scrubbing

For an engine room that hasn’t had an engine run in it since I sandblasted and painted the bilge in 2009, there was a lot of oily residue under this engine. The oil actually came from the Ford Lehman engine I initially installed that was rebuilt by Chesapeake Marine Engineering. Consistent with the quality of other work Aric Euler did for me, the engine leaked oil and made a mess. The Lehmans are long gone though, and now the oily mess is, too. Good riddance!

Engine bilge cleaned up nicely

I also have to say that gantry I made is slick! [pats self on back]. Being able to move this one-ton engine around with one hand, or rotate it 90 degrees to get it out of the way is super helpful.

ZF 280A marine gear sump doesn’t clear the engine bed frame

The Cummins engines and ZF gears are identical side-to-side, so the clearance problems are somewhat different from the port side to the starboard. It turns out the port side was far easier to fit.

Bosch jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade easily makes space for the ZF gear

Moroso 400w engine oil pan heater installed

After sanding the paint off the aluminum oil pan, I wiped down the surface with acetone and bonded the Moroso oil pan heater directly to the metal. Then I ran a bead of RTV silicone around the pad and let it sit for 24 hours. With these oil pan heaters installed, I won’t need the (reportedly) troublesome intake air heaters that come from the factory on these Cummins engines. I may remove those later.

Original seacock has to go

The original seacocks were 1-1/2″, which is too small for the Cummins 6CTAs. I’ll cut out the old pipe and weld in new 2″ standpipes later, but first I need to remove the old seacock while the engine is out of the way. The tough part is getting the pipe wrench to bite without damaging the seacock (coming soon to the For Sale section) and still have swing room, but without bashing fingers on the metal framing. Demonstrating the timelessness of “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” I used a 2×4 to swing the pipe wrench and get the seacock moving.

Boom

Ready for the hole saw from the under-side

The epoxy bonding the rear engine beds together will take a day to cure, then I’ll bond them and the front engine beds to the stringers and paint everything with Devoe Bar Rust 235 epoxy coating in tintable white base. After that, I’ll drill and bolt the engine beds to the stringers to augment the epoxy bond and then final fit the engine.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Port Engine III

1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Installing the Port Engine

Having installed the starboard engine, I learned many of the pitfalls to avoid and a few tricks that make the job easier. Installing the port engine should be much easier.

Read, set…GO!

Sleeping Beauty

Aside from rolling the engine over every few months, the starboard engine hasn’t budged since we craned everything into the boat through the salon roof hatch back in 2012. There’s a special tool for turning over Cummins engines, but I saved myself $50 and just bar it over using a wrench on the alternator pulley bolt. The pulley gives ~3:1 mechanical advantage, so I don’t even need a breaker bar to rotate this high compression diesel engine. It’ll be nice when I can just turn the key on and fire it up.

Lining up my home-built gantry with the propeller shaft

Floors braced…ready to lift

Once lifted, I can move the 1-ton engine with one hand

My custom-made shaft positioning tool

It might look like just some cobbled-together blocks of wood, but my shaft positioning tool is designed to rigidly hold the shaft in place even if it gets tapped by the gear coupler. A block on the bottom allows me to clamp the whole thing to the stringers, and I used a hole saw to make a cut-out on the top  block that just fits the shaft. Once I get the shaft aligned in the log side-to-side, sliding the tool back and forth on the stringers adjusts the height.

Dial indicator makes centering the shaft super easy

First, I position the dial indicator then let the shaft drop until it hits the bottom of the log. I take a reading, then I lift the shaft straight up until it hits the top of the log. Take another reading, subtract to find the distance to within 0.001″, and divide that number in half…there’s your center. There was .240″ total clearance, so I raised the shaft 0.120″ from the bottom of the log, and locked down my shaft positioning tool. Doing this on the port engine took the better part of a day. This time, with my fancy tools, it took about an hour.

Original engine bed boxes have to be cut out

One quick pass with a circular saw just about does it

One thing I really like about aluminum is that you can cut it using carbide woodworking tools. With a sawsall, it took the professional “marine engineer” who failed to install the engines in 2012 about 20 minutes to cut off one of these boxes. So instead of using a metal cutting blade on a sawsall, I just use a circular saw blade that’s intended for demolition work to make a long cut through the weld.  With my circular saw, it took about a minute for the first cut.

One minute with my Harbor Freight sawsall does the rest

In the pic above, you can see that I clamped a 2×4 to the stringer. I used that as a guide to keep the line straight when I made the cut with the circular saw.

All four engine bed boxes cut off in 25 minutes

Custom engine alignment tool: framing square clamped to a piece of aluminum angle at the halfway mark

Front engine mount needs modification, same as the port side did

I know from installing the port engine that with my down-angle ZF 280A gear, the engine will sit nearly level with the stringers when it’s finally in place. So I’ve got to have the vibration isolator landing pads on the front engine mount cut off and raised 3/4″, with the slot cut inboard by about an inch from the original.

Inner rear mount needs machining, too.

After blocking the engine above the stringers, I dropped the mounts off at a local machine shop for modification. In this one day, I accomplished what took three weekends the first time around on the port engine. Once I get the mounts back, I’ll clean them up and paint them, then scrub the engine bilge, grind off the remnants of the welds from the original engine beds, and make the spacer blocks for the vibration isolators. I’ll wrap it up by painting the stringers and bilge with Devoe Bar Rust 235 epoxy coating, positioning the engine, final alignment, and then I’ll bolt it all in place.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Installing the Port Engine II

 

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cummins Engine Install — Spacers II

In my last article, I wrote about the second step in the process of  installing the Cummins engines into my Roamer. I came up with one plan for engine beds that didn’t work out at all, then cut up one of the beds to make spacers that should work just fine. But then I realized that the top of the stringer on one side isn’t square to the stringer upright, which complicates things just a bit. Just when I thought I’d worked around that problem, another one jumped out to bite me.

Up front, the vibration isolators are totally bottomed out

I even had to remove the locknut (lower left corner of the picture above) to lower the front of the engine far enough.

At the back, 1-1/2″ thick spacers put the engine at the right height

Perfect fit…zero gap at the couplers

But then, I checked the clearance under and around the engine…

There’s less than 1/8″ between the oil pan and one of the frames

There’s also zero clearance between the gear cooler and the top of the stringer. I need to move the engine out of the way and make some space.

Gotta love that gantry!

The gantry is absolutely the best tool I’ve ever made. Moving these one-ton engines around by a couple thousandths or a couple of feet is a one-man job.

Jigsaw makes quick work of the frame

That little wedge I cut out of the aluminum frame to make room for the oil pan will come in very handy in my next article.

Sharpie mark on the stringer marks the line for the fuel cooler

I need to cut the top of the stringer along the line I marked with a Sharpie so the fuel cooler bracket at the top of the pic above will fit between the stringers.  These coolers are notorious for causing installation headaches, and I’m experiencing that personally on my boat. Either way, it’s nothing that a gantry and jigsaw can’t fix.

Just like the front, the inner stringer isn’t square at the back

I’ll square that up the spacer when I finally install it in the next step.

The spacer is looking good…but..oh jeez.

I was so focused on the gear-to-prop shaft coupler gap, and centering the engine between the stringers, and trying to figure out what to do with the front motor mounts that are bottomed out, and the inner stringer that isn’t square to the upright frame that I totally missed the HUGE problem in the pic above.

The prop shaft coupler and gear coupler are perfectly mated, and the propeller is the exact distance it should be from the aft-most strut. But the 1/2″ bolt that will secure the rear vibration isolator to the stringer lands in the middle of the transverse frame behind the gear. That frame is welded to the engine-side of the upright stringer and the piece of aluminum angle in the pic above that forms the top of the stringer. There’s no good way to drill a hole through the stringer that won’t put the bolt and nut in the middle of that upright frame or the weld that holds everything together.

A pic from my last article shows the offending frame–how did I miss THAT???

I can’t move the engine back so the bolts clear the frame, since that would require pushing the prop shaft further out of the boat, which would put the propeller hub 2″ past the aft-most  cutlass bearing. I can’t pull the prop shaft further into the boat, because that would put the prop too close to the aft-most strut. The prop shaft can be shortened, but it’s already machined and installed. I could also have a new set of motor mounts made (which is probably what I should have done from the beginning). All of which reminds me of something I wrote about before: the butterfly effect, and how little tiny things that happened a long time ago can cause ripples in time that wind up kicking me in the balls years down the road.

I was originally going to order the prop shafts after the mechanic installed the engines, so I’d know exactly how long they needed to be. I fired the mechanic after he didn’t get the engines installed for several months back in 2012, but I’d already ordered the prop shafts based on his measurements. If only we had done things per the original plan…

While mulling over what to do about this new problem, I kept working on the spacers.

Epoxy + cabosil + atomized aluminum powder glues spacers together

Shopsmith 12″ sanding disk smooths the bonded aluminum

Nice radii on all sharp spacer corners

Good lookin’ spacer, ready for install

As I was finishing up sanding the spacers, an idea from years before came back to me. I remembered that in my original plan I was going to use DriveSavers to isolate my prop shafts from the gear. DriveSavers are basically industrial strength rubber donuts that isolate prop vibration, provide drivetrain protection in the event of a prop strike, and they break electrical continuity between the hull (via the engine & gear) and the prop shaft and prop, which is even more important on metal boats than on other hull materials. Far more important, though, was that DriveSavers generally require the engine to be moved forward or the prop shaft to be cut by about 1″ to make space for the rubber donut. In my case, they’ll permit me to move the engines forward far enough for those aft-most rear vibration isolator bolts to clear the upright frame, plus provide all of the benefits that originally convinced me they were something I needed on my boat.

We’re back in business…I think.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cummins Engine Install –DriveSavers & Spacers

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Gantry Time II!

It’s mid-summer in the Mid-Atlantic region, which means it’s hot! And in Tent Model X, it’s hotter still. Up on the deck level, it’s well past 100 degrees by 11am most days. But down in the engine room, two tons worth of Cummins 430hp 6CTA Diamonds are nice and cool, just waiting to be installed.

The original plan was to have the engines installed by a Navy-trained “marine engineer” back in 2012. But the pro kept slipping the schedule until it was 2013. I eventually learned that he was sloppy, incompetent, and that he grossly overcharges for services–sometimes even charging twice for the same service. Other customers of his confirmed similar experiences. So I fired him and, like so many other things, decided to DIY the install. I’d already ordered the propeller shafts based on his calculations, and the vibration isolators, strainers, etc., were all brand new, sitting in boxes…all of which were stolen when the big theft happened back in May 2014. But the insurance company covered that loss (minus depreciation and deductibles), so once again I have all the pieces ready to go. While awaiting settlement from the insurance company, I designed a gantry that I’d use to move these big chunks of metal around. All I had to do was buy the I-beam and tubing and get to welding.

The Gantry Plan

Unfortunately, the SD card that had all of the pix of the gantry build got corrupted, so what follows are the ones I was able to recover.

Gantry top plate and I-beam, drilled and fitted with 1/4-28, Grade 8 bolts

Grind off mill scale in preparation for welding

Tacked the two nuts on the end of the plate, since they will be inside the main upright

Getting low on CO2/argon…but it should be enough

I-beam, top plate, and upright, ready for welding

No, I was not drunk when I laid that wobbly bead

I tacked all of the pipes, the top plates, and the upright sections in place, then put heat to ’em. I’m not a professional welder, and even as an amateur I don’t weld enough to retain the skills I picked up during high school welding class many decades ago. But I was out of position! It was getting dark! Dinner was ready! 😉

Anyway…compared to some farmer welds I’ve seen (to say nothing of home-built trailers!), it should be just fine.

Welding at night, but I got ‘er done…looks just like the plan!

I sure wish I had a welding table, and a bigger garage, and…the list goes on.

Now that the gantry is ready to go, I ordered a gantry trolley and chain hoist from Harbor Freight. I’m ready to move all the heavy steel to the boat and start working on getting those engines in. It’s a good thing that gantry comes apart…that I-beam is heavy!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cummins Engine Installation I

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Gantry Time

I’ve been having a heck of a time finding a mechanic I can trust. I would have preferred to have somebody come in and install the engines, but the three mechanics who have come out have failed to impress. When competence isn’t the concern, the prevailing attitude seems to be “Meh…it’s an old boat,” and that attitude manifests in the quality of work being done. It’s frustrating.

Anyway, the time has come to move the engines back into their final resting place. I’ll need a gantry to move them, since the Cummins 450 Diamonds with gears weigh about one ton each. I’ve been looking online, but all of the ready-made gantries are too big, too small, too tall, or too beefy to be lifted up onto the boat and then into the salon where the engine hatches are. So, I decided to buy a trolley from Harbor Freight and make my own gantry. I messed around with Google Sketch-up and came up with a structure that can be disassembled into manageable pieces, is just the right size for this application, and will have no problem supporting one ton.

Gantry plan

Gantry leg

It turns out that you can buy the steel (cut-to-size from shapirosupply.com) and trolley, including shipping, for less than half what a Harbor Freight gantry costs. While it will take some time to weld together and drill and tap holes, I’d spend about the same amount of time modifying the HF gantry to work in the boat.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Laying Out the Aft Cabin Walls