Ok, so after some excellent boat yoga sessions, and lots of cussing like a sailor, my brother and I were able to get things reasonably aligned and back together. Still need to source some nuts, more info below.
Like all boat projects, the more we got into it, the more amazing it was that things were running correctly at all before.
First I went to put the socket on the top lock nut of the port engine mount. Why can’t I get the socket on there??? Oh! There are no nuts on the top of that mount, sweet!
How am I going to get the rest loosened, I can’t get a wrench in there? Oh, it doesn’t matter, they are all loose!
Need to adjust the motor to port, gotta loosen the lag screws….oh would you look at the that, the aft one has walked all the way up against the bottom of the engine…
So yeah, all sarcasm aside, our engine mounts were a mess of loose or missing things. It was odd though that everything could be tightened, and nothing was stripped, making me wonder why it was all so wrong.
The alignment went pretty straight foward once I got a wrench that would fit between the bottom of the mount and the engine support, seems like their strategy had been “its aligned when all mounts are bottomed out”. Can’t figure out how else you would end up with this situation.
During alignment we had removed the drive saver (pulling the shaft coupling directly against the transmission output flange), and I think I found out why the drive saver had been added. Not so much because they wanted the protection, I think it was being used to move the shaft running surface between it and the shaft seal to a new location. While aligning, the shaft seal was leaking copious amounts of water. Once the shaft is back in the saver location, the drip was once again a drip instead of a flood. This also tested that our bilge pump does in fact work great!
The original cause of failure also became obvious. I had bought replacement socket head cap screws of the same length for the drive saver, and while putting them on the transmission flange found I could not get complete thread engagement. On closer inspection, if I went from 1-1/4” bolts, to 1-1/2” then they would strike nuts on the back of the transmission. But as is, you don’t get complete thread engagement of the nut. Looking at the ones that fell off, I can now see the previous owner had only attained around 2 threads on each nut. You can see the close tolerance below. It’s actually the one but on the right that strikes a longer bolt (shaft is clocked in a way that makes it hard to see)
Takeaways and questions:
1. Have others put a drive saver on a HBW-50 and run into the same issue? Thinking I might have to make a custom set of bolts.
2. Need to keep checking my mounts. The nuts are fine thread M16, so having to special order new ones, but probably should replace my mounts outright soon.
3. What are peoples tips for loosening the lock nut on a stuffing box? I now own two HUGE adjustable wrenches, but the corrosion on the nuts seems to have welded them together, as shown below? I put more force than I was comfortable with while remembering this was keeping the ocean out of my boat, and nothing budged.