Miles Turner

For every sailor who works on his own engine 👆

I retired thinking there wasn't a tight space left on this earth that could beat me. I was a pipefitter for thirty-eight years. Steam and chilled-water lines, threaded through the guts of hospitals and schools, into walls and chases other men took one look at and said could not be done. I made my living reaching the unreachable. So when Judy and I finally sold the house we raised our two girls in and bought a 1979 Tartan with an old Perkins diesel and pointed her south, I figured the one thing I would never have to worry about was the engine. I can fix anything. I have always been able to fix anything. Then a thirty-dollar rubber impeller, a part I could see with my own eyes and lay one finger flat against, beat me for three days straight and damn near ended the best thing the two of us ever did. Here is what nobody tells you when you buy the dream. We were anchored up a quiet creek off the bay, first season south, the kind of evening that does not look real in a photograph. I had just shut the diesel down after motoring in when I saw the temperature needle had climbed higher than it had any business being. Raw water pump. I knew it before I had the engine box open. No cooling water coming through. And on a boat, that is not a flat tire in a parking lot. The engine is how you charge the batteries, how you keep the bilge pump alive, and how you claw off a lee shore at two in the morning when the wind clocks around and starts setting you down onto the rocks. Out here the engine is not a convenience. It is the thing standing between the dream and a Mayday call. Here is the thing about that Perkins the broker never mentioned. To make a diesel fit a hull, the builder boxes it into a space the size of the cabinet under your kitchen sink, and to make that work they tuck the raw water pump down behind the alternator, facing aft, hard against the bulkhead. The impeller, the one part on the whole engine you are guaranteed to have to replace, sits exactly where a grown man cannot get a straight hand, let alone a tool. There is a fellow on the forums who finally gave up and cut a hole clean through the bulkhead from the head, just to reach his. On the engineer's drawing, in a clean white office, there is room back there. On your back at anchor with a headlamp throwing shadows and the boat rolling under you, there is not. The bolt is not the problem. The bolt is just steel. The problem is the geometry of every single tool that will physically fit in that hole. I had a good kit aboard. Forty years of buying the right tool for the job. Every one of them failed the same way. A straight ratchet, the handle hit the engine bed before the socket ever touched the bolt. A stubby, ten degrees of swing on a bolt that needed a real pull. A flex-head ratchet, it bent in past the alternator, seated the socket, then folded at the exact second I loaded it, because the flex joint is the weak point, and the socket walked off and opened my knuckle on the engine bed. A universal joint on an extension, it deflected sideways and twisted right off the head. A wobble socket gave me the angle and stole the torque, which is exactly backwards from what a salt-seized bolt wants. Picture threading a needle with a piece of cooked spaghetti. That is every flex extension and wobble socket and u-joint in a sailor's bag, against a bolt the builder buried and the salt welded shut. Every one of them bends in the exact place it has to stay rigid. So I did what you do. I got on the radio and asked around the anchorage. The nearest diesel man was booked three weeks out, a hundred and seventy-five an hour, and he told me on the VHF that to reach that pump properly he would likely have to jack the engine up off its mounts, and that if it came to that I was looking at a haul-out. That is a thousand dollars before anyone so much as picks up a wrench. For a thirty-dollar part. The cruisers have a word for a thousand dollars. They call it a boat unit, and they say it with a tired little laugh, because everything out here is measured in boat units and the boat always wins. And you cannot even hire it done fast anymore. The good diesel men are retiring off the docks faster than anyone is replacing them. In the spring the wait runs into months. I sat in the cockpit that evening with grease to my elbows and a thirty-dollar impeller in my hand that I could not install, looking out at the prettiest water on God's earth, and I did a thing I had not done in forty years. I doubted myself. I sat there wondering, quietly, whether I had talked my wife out of a paid-off house and into a slow-motion mistake. Judy came up with two cold drinks and did not ask me how it had gone. She has been reading my face for forty-one years. She just sat down next to me and said, we will figure it out. She always says that. She has always been right. The next morning a man named Lloyd rowed over from a weathered ketch anchored across the creek. Seventy-three. Thirty years a marine diesel mechanic in a yard up on the Chesapeake before he and his wife cut the lines for good. He had heard me on the radio the day before. He looked down into my engine box for about a minute, nodded the way old hands nod when they have seen a thing a hundred times, and rowed back to his boat without a word. He came back with a tool I had never laid eyes on in forty years of fixing my own things. A flat steel bar, slim, about a foot and a half long, blue, with a square drive on each end and a gentle bend set into the middle. I went to flex it the way you flex a flex-head ratchet, and it would not give an inch. He popped a little cap off the back and tilted it so I could see down inside. Running the whole length of that sealed bar was a roller chain. "The chain takes the bend for you," Lloyd said. "The bar holds its shape and the chain carries the torque dead square onto the bolt, no matter what angle you come at it from. I pulled raw water pumps and heat exchanger zincs and motor mount bolts on other people's boats for thirty years with a bar like this. The yard wants you hauled because the yard's tools only work in the yard. That was never your problem. The builder made it that way and let us sell you the fix." That is the voice of a man who spent thirty years watching the flat-rate book charge people for access they could have had for free. Not a forum opinion. Not a pitch. He told me where he got his. I ordered one off my phone right there at the chart table, on one bar of signal I had to climb the companionway to find. Seventy-nine dollars. Direct from the maker, and Lloyd was firm about this part. They sell it off their own website only. Not at West Marine, not at any chandlery, and not on Amazon. He said the bars you see on Amazon look the same from the outside but they run a flex shaft or a universal joint inside, the exact flexing thing that had just cost me three days and a knuckle. Without the real sealed chain it is just a bent bar that folds the second you load it. One place sells the one that works. A cruising buddy heading our way brought it out four days later. I slid that slim bar in behind the alternator where nothing straight had ever fit, dropped my socket on the pump bolt, and pulled slow and steady. It broke loose on the second pull. The socket sat flush the whole time. No rock, no walk, no skinned knuckle. New impeller in, pump back on the block, and when I hit the start button the cooling water came pouring out the exhaust like the engine was brand new. I sat down right there in the cockpit and laughed out loud, alone, like a crazy man. We caught the next weather window. We were two days down the coast with the engine running cool and the batteries full. I have used that bar since on the heat exchanger zinc that hides against the bulkhead, on the motor mount bolt I had been ignoring for a year, on a neighbor's Yanmar at a dock one Sunday when no yard within fifty miles was open. Thirty-dollar jobs the boat had been holding hostage for years, every one of them a bolt I could see and could not turn. The bar lives in the nav station now, not the bottom of the tool bag. Up top, where the trouble always finds me. There is a young couple anchored two boats over, late twenties, out on their first old boat and scared of the engine the way they ought to be. There is a bar coming out to them on the next supply run, no note. They will understand it the first time a bolt starts to give and the bar does not fold. If you sail behind an auxiliary diesel, and you have ever lain across a hot engine staring at a bolt you could see and could not turn while the temperature needle climbed and the light went out of the sky, you already know exactly what this post is about. They sell it direct from their own site only, www.wildbeartools.com not West Marine, not the chandlery, not Amazon. The knockoffs look the same from the outside. They do not have the chain. They do not work. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench