Titusville - The new transmission is installed!

Plenty of room behind the engine!

We had the rear oil seal ready for installation for the last several days but the transmission was late in arriving so we held off on the work until everything could be done all at once. Today was that day. Mike, the mechanic, showed up at 8:45 and started in. The Beneteaus are a favorite of the charter companies partially because they are easy to work on, there's plenty of room in the engine compartment unlike my previous boat, a 38 foot Ericson which had no room at all!

All the components came off in short order with the heaviest being the flywheel which weighed in a about 100 lbs! After everything was off, Mike said he would be back the first thing next week to complete the job... We were waiting for that comment! He was only joking of course. He took a lunch break and return around 1:00 pm to wrapped everything up. The hardest part was putting the flywheel back on. It takes a lot of strength but the hardest part was aligning the bolt holes with the back of the engine which trying to heft a 100 lb flywheel where you couldn't see the bolt holes. It took the two of us about 30 minutes at least to finally hit the right combination of twist and heft.; I was on the motor shaft to keep it from turning and Mike was hefting the flywheel.

Looks pretty innocent but at what cost?

Once past the flywheel re-installation, the rest was smooth sailing. Overall, installing the new rear oil seal and new transmission took 5.5 hours, about 1/2 hour longer than I anticipated. I made a pdf file of the whole procedure, Volvo D2-55 Rear Seal Replacement. Now Fleetwing is whole again and ready for the rest of the trip south. We'll leave for New York Friday morning and hope to arrive at our daughter's house by 3:00 pm or so on Saturday.

Since this is our last night on Fleetwing, it will also be the last night of the blog. The blog will resume January 4 upon our return to Titusville and this year we will have Finn in tow assuming everyone is healthy. We will have all the home schooling material with us and we plan on doing a lot of exploring with Finn to include the Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge and the Brevard County Zoo which is much better than you might expect!

Join us again when the blog will restart on January 4, 2017!