Diesel Woes:
“I just don’t want to battle this anymore” Jack let out a heavy sigh, taking a break from contorting upside down in the engine bay. He sat with his knees on the designated pad we had kept from our cushion replacement project, it’s a good thing too because with our engine troubles he had put that pad to good use. Sweat dripping from his brow and grease coated hands, we had arrived in Crescent City, CA on our passage South from Vancouver to San Francisco and Jack had spent the last 2 hours repairing our transmission. Although Jack no longer had a career as a BMW mechanic, somehow he found himself turning wrenches way more often than he would like.
This was not the first time we had dealt with engine issues - in fact we had been riddled with mechanical gremlins since the first year we bought Gemini, our Passport 42, almost 6 years before. Heat exchanger cracks, fouled injectors, poorly designed exhaust riser, shot motor mounts and a transmission that just didn’t want to stay bolted onto the engine. We had seen it all on our virtually brand new Kubota 4 cylinder with nearly 300 hrs when we took ownership. “Kubotas are great, they will run forever!” That’s what we kept hearing from all the old salts who we commiserate with, hoping they knew a solve all to our engine saga. Well, unfortunately luck would have it that ours didn’t run that well at all. We were tired of having failure after failure, many times in remote locations as we ventured off the dock on our floating home. How were we supposed to trust something that has proved to be so unreliable? At least, engine issues weren’t an uncommon occurrence for us sailors, so we had plenty of compassionate shoulders to lean on.
We had left our slip in Emeryville, CA for good about 5 months before, sailing North to circumnavigate Vancouver Island. In the span of our Northern adventures, we had dealt with transmission issues 4 times, leaving us to hobble things together in isolated anchorages where our only neighbors were the Brown bears rummaging the coastline looking for their dinner. Having dealt with similar issues before, we had the transmission removal and repair down to a NASCAR pit speed: tie a line around the transmission, disconnect the Aquadrive coupling with Allen keys, use the 16mm deep socket to remove the transmission bell housing from the engine flywheel… the first time this happened, it took over 4 hours and many curse words from start to finish - now we had cut the time down by more than half, but the curse words somehow never ceased to be involved.
Each time we dealt with this transmission issue, we unveiled a further issue with the way the system was designed and installed. The Kubota and transmission weren’t compatible and the “qualified mechanic” who installed it before she was ours had modified things to make it work, which was causing repeated failure. Something had to be done, we couldn’t continue cruising to remote locations with a problematic diesel. With the transmission put back together with yet another band-aid fix, we started weighing our options: find a different transmission and redesign our drive train to eliminate the issue, buy an entirely different motor and drivetrain or, as we had dreamt about one day doing: convert to electric propulsion.
Going electric was always of interest to us, but with a relatively young diesel, we couldn’t justify pulling it out just yet and we felt that waiting a few years would only allow for electric systems to improve. “The technology just isn’t there yet” was a phrase tossed around between us and other sailors when chatting about electric propulsion. Really, the electric motor itself hasn’t changed in decades, it was all the power storage, management and renewables that needed time to improve. Over the next 11 months we dove into everything electric and renewables and really dial in our dream system. It quickly became apparent the technology is already here, it just took a lot of digging to get the right information in our hands. Little did we know this project would spur the birth of Powerflow Marine. After finding the balance of costs, efficiency, and reliability we had to spread the word and save you the months of digging through product manuals, dead end product enquiries and useless speculation.