The generator saga is still playing out and has been
frustrating to say the least. Some might
think that a little retail therapy would be just what the doctor ordered. Those people aren't buying diesel parts.
As previously stated, we have far more time on our hands
than money. After much research, we
found that the motor part of our Westerbeke generator was manufactured by
Mitsubishi. A couple of hours of conferring
with my friend Google and I had a Mitsubishi manual in hand, and 50% in
Japanese. I spent a couple of hours
looking at schematics in both the Westerbeke & Mitsubishi books and had two
sets of parts lists. Dealers selling the
Mitsubishi parts were far cheaper than their name brand counterparts so we got
parts on order.
Promptly at 10:30 am on Tuesday the parts arrived. Unfortunately we had not been told that they
shipped or provided a tracking number, so about 2:30 pm I called the dealer. It turns out they were shipped from a
warehouse in Ohio and Choo Choo got screwed on the shipping cost, but he traced
the package and told me that the marina had signed for them in the morning, they
just hadn’t bothered to let us know that a UPS
Red Morning Delivery package was there for us. I guess nothing important gets shipped UPS
overnight, silly me.
Friday morning the rings arrived, a perfect match from the
Westerbeke dealer. By 1:00 they were
installed. It was now time to install the head gasket that we saved $60 on by
going with the Mitsubishi part, too bad it didn't quite fit. It was close, very close, so close that we
decided to go ahead and make a couple modifications and use it for the
weekend. It was cheaper to go with what
we had than to try to find one and have it shipped in. With that puppy installed we were off and
running on the remainder of the installation.
Everything was going great until we got to the exhaust manifold, the
Mitsubishi gasket was close enough to use for the weekend but will need to be
reordered too. So much for saving a few
bucks.
Fast forward to where I sit writing this post. We are anchored out for the weekend, it is
Monday and we’ve had a great time. And
no, the Generator didn't start. A very
generous friend was kind enough to lend us his Honda 2000 for the weekend. Tomorrow we’ll sail home and take up the task
of getting the generator going again.
That's us in the middle. |