As many of you may have seen in your various news feeds, Friday August 26th is/was International Dog Day.
As you can see, they have become quite the couple themselves.
Going to the Dogs is a bad thing?
I’ve always been curious about the origin of all the various sayings we have in our language and years ago I was quite surprised when I looked up “it’s a dog’s life” and found it defined as “a difficult, boring, and unhappy life” and that “going to the dogs apparently means “: to become ruined : to change to a much worse condition,The economy is going to the dogs.” All my experiences with dogs had been quite the opposite and as you can see in the photos above, Ruby and Barney certainly seem to have a life that many would envy.
However, I must admit that of late things aboard Möbius do seem to fit the dictionary definition of “going to the dogs” with the various problems that have cropped up with our FireFly batteries, Kabola diesel water heater and the list goes on. Latest addition this week was finding that the Bow Thruster was not working and I’ll use that example to highlight my contrarian perspective wherein I regard all these as challenges to be taken on and resolved and that in the end they turn out to be good things.
That’s not a Bug! That’s a Feature!!
Another common phrase we often hear is that when life deals you lemons, make lemonade. Along similar lines, one of the more profound and transformative concepts I synthesized during my decades working with software and technology, was that rather than “problems”, such challenges present me with the opportunity “to transform bugs into features”. I have come to realise that it is largely a matter of perspective. If you look at things differently, things look different. In addition to the new understanding and skills I learn by fixing things and resolving these challenges, they also present me with the opportunity to improve and make things better after they are fixed than they were originally. The problem with the Bow Thruster “challenge” this week is the most recent example I can use to illustrate how I apply this “bugs into features” approach.
Not surprisingly then, these exposed copper connections had suffered from severe corrosion.
This is the four wire connector with the 24V positive connection being completely corroded and making no connection to the Red wire it joins.
Not much surprise then that the Bow Thruster wasn’t working.
Quite surprising and disappointing to me to find such an obvious design fault in what is otherwise a very high quality bit of kit, and it made no sense to just clean up the fuse holder and redo the four wire connectors as the same thing would just repeat itself, presenting me with the “opportunity” to not just fix the problem but to improve the whole wiring setup.
My apologies that I forgot to take photos as I was working and hope these generic images will still help you understand what I did to transform these bugs into features.
√ Fuse now fixed and working
√ Sealed fuse holder
√ Better protected location
√ Easier to access for future fuse replacements
√ No more exposed connections
√ No more corrosion
Hope this helps illustrate my perspective on how to transform bugs into features.
With the above as context, I have a much bigger and much better example of my latest transformation; Mr. Gee 2.0! Here is a brief (consider the source) overview of what’s been happening with Mr. Gee lately.
Tick Tock
Several months ago, after Mr. Gee had about fifty hours of run time, I began to hear a metallic “ticking” noise when he was running. It wasn’t very loud and sounded very similar to when there is too much clearance between the end of an exhaust or intake valve and the rocker arm. I had previously done the recommended valve adjustment after about the first five hours of running and all the metal parts have been through multiple heating and cooling cycles. Shortly after hearing this new ticking sound I checked the valve clearances again and found them all to be spot on but the ticking noise continued.
After that I kept my ear attuned to the ticking and it seemed to stay the same, not changing or getting any louder so I thought it was perhaps just a normal Gardner sound and just kept listening closely on every engine room inspection while we were underway. I do one of these ER inspections every hour or two when we are underway and record all other engine data such as RPM, fuel consumption, SOG (boat speed over ground), oil temperature and pressure, coolant temperature, Exhaust Gas Temperature EGT and temperatures at various parts of the engine and the air in the Engine Room. Reviewing this spreadsheet allows me to see what all these readings should be and makes it easy to spot any changes.
Everything stayed the same until we about ten hours into making our way from the Greek island of Rhodes to Athens on the mainland. I began to notice some increased temperatures in the area of the cylinder heads by cylinder #3. All the other temperatures of oil and water and metal parts elsewhere remained the same but I also noticed that the ticking noise was getting louder. More like a slight metal on metal knocking sound. Always hard to tell with sounds inside an Engine Room if this is just your imagination or if the sound really is changing but I shut the engine down and did a much closer inspection of every part of the engine but found no visible signs of any leaks or other changes. So I restarted Mr. Gee and we continued.
You know where this is going! Sure enough the heat around the exhaust and intake ports of cylinder #3 continued to rise, the ticking noise got louder and the engine ran more unevenly. Not a condition that could be allowed to continue and so we rerouted ourselves to the closest island of Kalymnos where I would be able to take on this latest challenge and figure out how to transform this bug into a feature. This would have to wait for a month or so because we now had our granddaughters and family onboard followed by some other dear friends so not much time to work on Mr. Gee.
Eventually though, I was able to do some deeper testing and dismantled the engine enough to find that the exhaust and intake valves on cylinder #3 were defective and no longer sealing on their valve seats and hence not getting cooled down.
I am very fortunate to have some of the best experts there are when it comes to diesel engines and Gardner’s in particular. I have the Mr. Gardner himself, Michael at Gardner Marine Diesel GMD, the home of Mr. Gee and all Gardner engines and my long time friend Greg who I’ve known since we were in University and trade school together and who is the best expert on diesel engines I know. I spent a LOT of time texting and talking with Greg and Michael and they were both eXtremely generous with their time and patience. After going through all the possible scenarios and reviewing all the data and photos of what I was able to see, the problem and the solution became quite clear.
I had begun the restoration of Mr. Gee when Christine and I were house/pet sitting for some dear friends in Portugal and had a machine shop there do all the machining of the cylinder heads and block and install the new valve seats, valve guides and cylinder liners. Michael at GMD remembered this and he noted that installing new valve seats in these LXB engines is quite particular and he has seen problems in the past when other machine shops have installed new valve seats and valve guides, so this cast some doubt on whether these had all been installed correctly by the machine shop in Portugal. While we won’t know for sure until a more detailed examination of the valves, seats and heads improperly installed valve seats became the most likely suspects as to what was causing the problems with Mr. Gee and making that ticking noise.
It was possible I could remove the cylinder heads, order in new valves and seats and find a machine ship in Athens or somewhere to properly install all new valve seats and guides, but this would not be easy to arrange and would not be a shop that had experience working on Gardner engines so we quickly ruled out this option. To be completely sure that all the valves, seats and guides on Mr. Gee were 100% correctly installed, this work needed to be done at the Gardner works at GMD. Our attention thus turned to how best to do this?
30 Horses Gallop into the Scene…..
I should also note at this point, that I have been having a completely separate conversation with Michael all this year about converting Mr. Gee from the 150HP @1650 RPM he is currently at, to the 180HP @ 1800 RPM option which the 6LXB can be configured for. The 150HP setup is a Continuous or 100% duty cycle which means the engine can be run at this speed and HP 24/7 which many 6LXB’s are. The 180HP version has a lower duty cycle which means that you can run them safely at full power and RPM for shorter periods of time and then continue at lower RPM. Almost all diesel engines have this range of RPM/HP they can be configured for and on mechanical fuel injection engines such as the Gardner LXB, this involves physically changing the fuel injection pump setup to inject a higher volume of diesel fuel on each intake stroke and adjusting timing of the injectors and valve advance. Not that difficult but requires specialized tools, equipment and expertise from Gardner than what I am comfortable doing.
In our trips this year, about 80 hours total run time, we have been finding that the Goldilocks or sweet spot for the best combination of loads, EGT, speed and fuel economy is about 1400-1500 RPM so why am I interested running Mr. Gee at up to 1800 RPM? Simply put, I would like to have the option to call on those additional 30 HP, a 20% increase, in an emergency situation when that extra power could mean the difference between getting out of a situation vs loosing the boat. One example of such a situation is when you are at anchor and find yourself on a lee shore when the conditions change unexpectedly such that there are high winds and seas trying to push the boat onto the shore. Of course this always seems to happen at O’dark thirty and you are in the dark with every second counting, so being able to start your engine and call on every pony the engine has can make all the difference.
I had therefore wanted to do this conversion to the 180HP setup before we start venturing out on our longer passages and later in the season and was going to remove the fuel injection system from Mr. Gee and ship to GMD to do the conversion and then ship back so I could install it and we could continue our travels. The trick was going to be when and where to do this as Möbius would need to stay in one place while the fuel injection was off being reconfigured. Now that we found ourselves with such a rare and ideal side tie dock arrangement we serendipitously stumbled upon here in Kalymnos, this latest challenge with Mr. Gee’s valves and the repowering all seemed to converge into a perfect storm kind of situation and here is how this all came together.
Go BIG or Don’t Go!
As long time sailors, we have come to understand how critical it is that you have complete confidence in your boat before you go to sea. When you find yourself in those rare but inevitable situations where things have become very nasty and every decision is critical, having ANY doubts about your boat, or yourself, can be crippling and life threatening. Mother Nature can be an eXtremely effective teacher and you soon learn the hard truth about how critical such confidences is and that if you don’t have full confidence, then you don’t go to sea.
Given the high dependency we have on Mr. Gee for our propulsion and the fundamental requirement to have eXtreme confidence in all the critical systems on Möbius, it was not difficult for Christine and I to decide that we needed to go “all in” on this situation and transform all these “bugs” into features resulting from us doing everything possible to ensure that Möbius is the most seaworthy boat we could create.
I’m sure you can see where this is all headed. Rather than send just the fuel injection system to GMD to convert it to the 180HP version, go Big and send all of Mr. Gee to GMD. Michael made this decision even easier by kindly offering to do a full exchange of Mr. Gee for a new 6LXB that they would put together at the Gardner Works there at GMD. We send them Mr. Gee, they send us a new 6LXB we will now refer to as “Mr. Gee two point O” or Mr. Gee 2.0 They will transfer over a few of the external bits such as the items I have already polished such as the rocker covers, GMD side covers and the custom brackets I’ve designed and built for things like the sea water pump and hand crank system but these can all be done right after Mr. Gee 1.0 arrives at GMD and after the new Mr. Gee 2.0 has been built.
I hope that all of the above does not come across as me being flippant or suggesting this was all easy or without a good share of sadness and frustration along the way. It was all of those things and I do have thoughts about “Why me?” from time to time. But as I’ve often found with the big decisions in life, these were also very clearly Goldilocks decisions being just right, just for us and in that sense they were easy to make. The harder part has been dealing with all the time and logistics it has taken to do all this from a small remote island in the middle of one of the busiest and most disrupted summers in the EU and now waiting for the new Mr. Gee to get back here.
Out with the Old
As you might imagine it was rather hectic here going through all this testing, making the arrangements with the local crane truck to remove Mr. Gee 1.0, securing him to the pallet and arranging to get him trucked from Kalymnos to Athens and then onto two more ferries to get him all the way to the GMD in Canterbury in England, so I don’t have too many photos but here is a quick summary of all that.
Don’t even think about asking me how long this whole journey has taken! Let’s just say that all you’ve been hearing about disruptions to supply chains and shipping, record high tourist traffic this summer in Europe and how the whole EU tends to take their holidays in the month of August, is so very very true.
Going Out with a BANG!
She continues to be very self disciplined with her daily physio routines after her knee operation and been taking full advantage of her “Freedom Machine” aka her eBike, to explore this fascinating island we have been living on since July and finding new beaches for her in the water exercises. Click the link above to see all her photos and explanation of how this island is literally a dynamite place to be!
Thanks for joining me again this week and hope you’ll be back for more next week. I will!
-Wayne
Woah! But what about the countless hours of sleuthing and work you put into v1.0! Especially the oil/seal issues? Did all of those challenges have any bearing on looking at a v2.0 when it came up? I would guess it did, and I would have to say, I probably would have made the same decision! Hopefully you won’t have too many new features…errrr…bugs in v2.0!
Hi Steve! Thanks so much for taking time to read and all the more to comment here. Christine and I enjoy following your adventures on Kaos and you’ve been getting lots of good use and sea miles out of her.
You can certainly relate better than many to the reality of boat ownership and life aboard and will have your share of similar stories I’m sure of systems and equipment which even when brand new suffers from inexplicable “death” or worse, intermittent failures. Very frustrating and time consuming to track these down and resolve but also feels great when you eventually do.
I probably should have added another popular phrase to last week’s blog which I recall my Dad saying sometimes that “If it weren’t for bad luck I don’t think I would have any at all”! As you and so many others have seen this past year, that could be used to describe how it has felt at times when resolving things like the loss of oil pressure which seemed to elude me for months. I was finally able to get to the bottom of that which turned out to involve a deadly duo of rubber O-rings that were exceeding the maximum size tolerances and then a faulty oil pressure gauge, but that all seemed to be behind us and I don’t think had anything to do with the most recent valve seat failure. With literally hundreds of thousands of these Gardner LXB engines still out there powering boats, mostly commercial, all over the world and doing so with nary a problem that has become legendary for Gardner, I think I’ll chalk up our series of bugs/features to simply being a rare string of bad luck.
While I was confident that I had fully resolved the oil pressure issues you are quite right that it did factor into the decision to go all in for an all new 6LXB from Gardner, and added to the feeling we have that this was the best decision to make. As a fellow boater who understands the severity of any failure of things like propulsion and other critical systems, you would have made the same decision and so that helps too.
You can appreciate then how having the new engine run in on the dyno before it gets shipped will help ensure that there is unlikely to be any new “features” for me to deal with on Mr. Gee 2.0
Changing subjects a bit, though still on the “bad luck” theme, I recall that you installed FireFly batteries on your previous boat Rendezvous back in around 2016 and so I’m curious to know if they continued to work well for you and hopefully the new owner? If you have any insights or recommendations on the loss of capacity which half or our 24 FF batteries have suffered? I think I recall reading that you recently had to replace all the House batteries on Kaos and went with the same FLA batteries so you could get back up and underway for the summer and that you intend to sell them and go with lithium for your longer term solution. So I will look forward to learning more about your decisions and logic of the new House Battery setup you design and install.
Thanks again for your helpful comments and “moral support” Steve.
-Wayne
Wow. You keep on surprising me Wayne. I can’t believe how quickly you got that engine out and shipped to the UK. You’ve got my attention.
Hi Wade, where to we find you, Diane and sv Joana today?
As you know, I’ve had way too much practice lifting Mr. Gee up off of his engine beds so not too surprising I was able to get him out in short order this last time. After some VERY frustrating delays he has finally made it to the UK and is due to be delivered to Gardner tomorrow. They have the new engine largely built now and shouldn’t take too long to transfer over the custom brackets on Mr. Gee 1.0 and so I’m hoping that they can complete the dyno run in on the new engine so it can be shipped out in the next few weeks. Then I need to keep my fingers crossed that the return trip will go much faster than the marathon it was to get it from here to the UK. I will keep you and everyone here updated as that all plays out and I get Mr. Gee 2.0 installed and we get underway again.
Thanks for following on and do keep us posted as you guys proceed with your latest adventures.
-Wayne
so many plot twists in this story !
Well, I am married to a VERY talented author so perhaps some of Christine’s story telling skills are rubbing off on me?
I’ll do my best to continue to keep you entertained Andy so stay tuned for more to follow.
Wayne
I feel a little sad to think that you’ve spent so much time and energy trying to make this engine into the reliable workhorse you were expecting only to have it fail again… maybe, its many years in a previous life as a working tugboat engine were just too many?
Anyways, I’m glad to read that you will have a whole new power plant to replace it. Hopefully this time is the charm for a flawless reliable engine.
Hi Evan. Yes, lots of emotions flowing here on Möbius as we work our way through this latest challenge. But as we say in such situations, “This too shall pass” and with Mr. Gee having finally arrived in the UK this past weekend, I think this latest “storm” is passing and we can see some bright sunlight peeking through.
I don’t think that Mr. Gee’s former life played any role in the string of bad luck we have had with him as the only parts that remain on these engines once they have been fully rebuilt, are the main castings of the cylinder block, heads, crankcase and oil sump. Pretty much every other part is newly manufactured and so these engines are pretty much newly manufactured. GMD will be tearing Mr. Gee 1.0 down to do a “forensic audit” to figure out just exactly what did go wrong to cause the valve failure but the current culprit is improperly installed valve seats and/or valve guides by the machine shop I had do this work and who did not have any previous experience with Gardner engines. At the time I did not think this would be a problem and their work appeared to be good but no real way of testing this prior to assembling. So as you can imagine, I will be anxious to find out what they determine to be the cause of this very rare and unusual failure. Now that Gardner is building a brand new 6LXB to replace our original, our hope is the same as yours that we will soon end up with “.. a flawless reliable engine” that Gardner is legendary for building and are powering thousands of boats around the world every day.
Thanks for your encouragement and comments Evan, stay tuned for the next chapters in this adventure.
-Wayne