Thursday, 30 September 2010

Oil Leak

Wiki: A governor, or speed limiter, is a device used to measure and regulate the speed of a machine, such as an engine.
It's a good job we've been stress testing the engine on our river trails, because we've discovered that the governor is leaking. According to Steve, there are two ways of describing what's wrong. First.. "There's lateral movement on the shaft". And secondly, "That spindle arm is waving around like a prick in a bucket".

It's nothing too major, and easy enough to fix. Just a few convex/concave washers, and a new rubber ring. But it's meant we haven't been able to 'mess about on the river' for a couple of days. Upside of the problem is, now we know what a governor does. And how to tweak it. Slowly, day by day, mysterious bits of the engine are revealing their secrets to us.

2 comments:

  1. Take care "tweaking" governors, some of the adjustments SHOULD be locked and interfering with these could over rev the engine

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  2. nod... sure. Steve (Dean Marine) is doing the tweaking. We're not just going at it willy nilly. A little bit of downward adjustment has been made, less than a quarter turn, and now it chugs even more beautifully at tickover.


    The leak occured because the concave washers were corroded, and not providing the spring and support. The O-ring was probably also 20+ years old. To compensate, somebody had bunged in two shims. But they weren't keeping the chamber airtight. New washers are in the post. Fingers crossed, because we're hoping to get down to Windsor before the current starts up again.

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