bootlegger wrote:You could run a scavenge line sucking around the thrust. You should still get oil around it then.
I dont think the carnk splashing in the oil caused your problems.
They have been setting up the engines like that for years.
You could turn the engine around and run a z drive. That solves your worry of the crankshaft and will also make it real easy to freshwater cool it.
Off course all this extra stuff adds weight and makes things really complicated with more things to go wrong.
Yeh I'm looking at running a small belt driven gear scavenge pump to draw oil from the rear low point and pumping it back up to the front near the pick up.
I most cases the original set up would have been average at the best but the variable with this one is the dipstick and marked low and full levels that the engine has been running at. The dipstick isn't the original one and has been marked with a very high oil level that causes the timing gear end to be flooded with oil. In my trade as a mechanic I have seen over full oil levels on engines cause various problems such as high vibration, high oil consumption, high fuel consumption, low power, oil aeration causing low oil pressure issues, etc. I remember a few years ago trying to find the cause of a vibration in a Denning Coach. The vibe would shake the hole bus on long its length at any speed above 50kph. To much oil in the engine was the problem with the counterweights bashing through the oil. It was a rear engine bus and you could feel the vibe in the steering wheel!
I don't really want to re-engineer the boat with different drives or by turning the engine around so I'm trying the simplest fix to the problem without changing too much. Originality with a few mods is the go.
I've also just about nutted out the conversion to heat exchanger cooling and think it'll work well and will be compact enough to still fit under the cover.