First drive after Volvo Penta renovation

It was time to finalize the installation of the engine so that we could test it after our Volvo Penta renovation. We had lifted it to the correct position and we needed to connect the gearbox to the engine and the propeller shaft and connect diesel, sea water, cooling system to the boiler and some electricity to the engine before we could do a test start inside the boat.

First up was to assemble the gearbox and then connect it to the shaft. The gearbox need to be inserted precisely to its correct position and we used our rig (that we used when lifting the engine into position) to get the gearbox correctly into position. After that we could connect the shaft.

Another picture of the connection to the shaft.

Then we connected the diesel, sea water and cooling system so that we could do a test start inside the boat. Here’s a video from the first test start:

Then we decided to take the engine out for a test drive. First we just drove around in the marina. If the engine would break then we would at least wouldn’t be out in the sea. We drove around inside the marina for a while and the engine behaved really good. Before doing our renovation the engine had trouble running on idle and when put it in reverse it died. Now it was no problem running on idle or to put it in the reverse! 🙂 But everything wasn’t smoothly. We had an oil leak in the gearbox and a sea water leak in the oil cooler. We will need to do further investigations of them.

Here’s a little video from our first drive inside the marina:

After driving around in the marina for about half an hour we drove to the islands of Fjäderholmarna and back to run the engine with some more speed. We drove around 3.5 knots, we don’t want to run the engine to hard in the beginning before all parts have run in together.

Another major improvement is the amount of smoke from the exhaust…