Late Model EC Engine Mounts

Chuck Millar, Cadenza, #616

Pulling the engine, which was relatively easy to do with a come-along attached to a 4X4. It wasn't quite as easy to slide it back in and get it to line up on the engine mounts, but I managed.

I wonder if this design was set up just on late model east coasters. It is a well-defined cradle of fiberglass in which the engine sits, but it seems to be designed to allow some give at the forward ends. I don't know whether this was intentional or not, but it sure makes it hard to do precise lateral movements of the engine. It's hard to see the depth in the one on the port side, but you can see how far up the starboard one extends. There must be 9 or 10 inches extending upward unsupported, and you can move either one of them about 1/2 inch from side to side fairly easily.

Rather than replacing this whole engine bed structure, I'm thinking of installing a lateral brace that would bolt onto the plywood partition beside the engine mount and also through a hole I would drill in the forward side of the engine mount. This is a right-angle bracket that has a two-inch arm and a five-inch arm (approximate measurements, and slightly different on the port side). I'm thinking of using a rubber pad where the two-inch arm bolts to the partition to provide a cushion, in case the flexibility of the original engine bed was done on purpose.

I went out for a sail on Saturday and found that there was more vibration and noise from the engine than I remembered, so I spent Sunday fussing around with the alignment but unable to get much improvement.

I'm attaching a picture of the bore alignment, where you can see even from the picture that the propeller shaft is almost 1/8 of an inch to starboard of the engine flange. I have not been able to correct this even by moving the whole engine as far as possible to starboard. So, I decided to forget about bore alignment, especially since I doubt that the bore alignment has ever been exact on this boat. Instead, I decided to focus on face alignment, and try to get it down to a .004 tolerance.

With the engine mounted on those flexible mounts, it doesn't accomplish a whole lot to pry it on one mount because that mount just moves independent of the other. What I have done is to loosen the two forward mounts and the starboard aft mount, lever the front of the engine up about 1/4th inch with a couple of 2X4s through the hole you can see under the engine mounts (in the Engine_mount_stbd picture), and pry the engine one way or the other with a bar. Then I tighten the three mounts and check the face alignment. I was able to get it to about .009, first one side and then on the other. (Fortunately the clearance at top and bottom seems to be fairly even, so I just need to shift the engine laterally.) It's such a pain to go through this process, and so difficult to be precise with it, that I decided to go back to the plan of installing brackets so that I would have something solid to rest the engine on.