Me? Well, while dad was having all the fun with the pressure washer, lol, I was relegated to pulling out a twisted off stud from a hub, and packing both shafts with new packing material. Sheesh, my life for the afternoon was a small space in the bilge where I could hardly move a leg or an arm without bumping into something. I got down into the far Port outboard side of the port motor, and could hardly crawl back out. My belt had a Gerber knife on it, and it kept hanging up on the hatch enclosure, and I’m sure it would have been a great entry into “the world’s funniest video” program.
Here is the patient before surgery.....note the twisted off stud, making it impossible to remove the hub untill this is tended to.
Here is the patient during surgery......note the so called Easy Out tapped into the drill hole with a hammer, ready for removal.
First I drilled the old stud out, all the way down to the stainless steel shaft. I then used a larger diameter drill bit to further weaken the stud and allow for a bigger “Easy Out”. Whoever came up with the term “Easy Out” was a marketing genius, but the guy probably never actually used one of these wretched devices. Not so easy, but finally effective.
We thought we would have to remove the hubs to do the packing. That was the consensus last fall when we put the boat up. It looked too tight to pack anything without removing the hub, but faced with hub removal, I can ASSURE you I looked again and very closely, indeed. Guess what, there was barely enough room to add more packing, which I did (1/4” by the way, for the 31). Packing goes into the forward casting, and when it is screwed on tight, it compresses everything back into the casting an against the shaft.
The Easy Out wasn’t so easy, and as you can see, it was tougher than the so called Heavy Duty pipe wrench from Taiwan. Fortunately, I had other tools to do this job with me.
Can you believe this? I had this piece of equipment in my tool box for years, used it last to replace a ball cub shifting device on my 1983 928, and poof...........gone in sixty seconds. It is now purged from the tool box. No more pipe wrenches from Taiwan!
more photos in the next posting..........
Regards, Paul
