Taking the Tempurature

Somewhere in the ditch coming home from the Harvest Moon Regatta, we started having some “engine” troubles. The engine temperature was fluctuating. Turns out the engine itself was fine, but the gauge wast working. This started a fairly typical rabbit hole of a repair.

We decided to replace at least the temperature gauge and sender so that we could be confident. But, of course, while I’m looking at it, I decide that we should replace the other gauges as well, oil pressure and voltage. It seems like a simple enough swap out, and having accurate info seems like a good thing. This wasn’t a huge expense in terms of other boat work, so I’m feeling pretty good about it so far.

That’s when I started looking closer at it. Just swapping out one gauge might be simple enough wiring job, but its a solid rats nest there, and swapping the other 2 gauges as well as a new key switch, and all the new lights for them was going to take me a week of wiring. So I called up my buddy Brent who has done all my other electrical, and had him work his magic. There goes that cheap upgrade…

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Swapping the senders on the engine was fairly straight forward, and we were able to fire it all up for a test. For some reason though, the temp sender still isn’t working. So, yet again we start looking closer. As we dismantle the coolant system, the spacer where the thermostat and the temp sender are installed is looking really rough. Its quite corroded and falling apart. Pretty clear why the temp sender wouldn’t work there. We called up Westerbeke and ordered the parts. Since its an older part, they have to manufacture it, it will be a few weeks.

We finally get the part and I get after installing it. Unfortunately, something is not fitting correctly. I start looking at it, and it turns out the part Westerbeke made us was manufactured incorrectly. one cutout is in the wrong spot. I call them back up and after 2 or 3 emails and sets of photos they agree and promise to send a new one. That’s another 2 weeks of waiting.

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During that time, I started really digging into the parts manual for my engine. Seems, that even that part wasn’t all that was wrong. Over time we had noticed odd sealed up parts of the coolant system. Our engine, and whoever had worked on it before us (remember the backwards fuel pump?) decided that some bypass hoses were not necessary and just sealed them up, and put the temp sender in the wrong location as well.

So now I’m on a “make it right” mission. We’ve rebuild the whole thermostat housing, added the new bypass locations, and put the new temp sender in the correct location. Now I’m just waiting for the sealant to cure to fire it up and give it a test. I’m writing this blog post as confidence that this is the end of this minor “lets fix the temperature gauge” story.