YouTube: It is not Just for Fixing Cars

My family always has a tradition of taking our sailboat out on the Great Salt Lake every 4th of July, anchoring the boat, and swimming/floating for hours. Sometimes we also actually get the sails up and go sailing. The Great Salt Lake is very shallow and is only 35 feet (10 meters) at its deepest. That means you have to walk a long way from the edge of the lake to get to where the water is deep enough to float. Taking a boat is the best way to get to where you can relax and float.

Unfortunately we thought we would have to miss our annual outing as I could not fix the engine on the boat. We really need the engine to get the boat in and out of the marina. Yes, it is a sailboat and we could use the sails to move the boat around but that is very difficult and best done only during emergencies. I have sailed the boat in and out of our slip and the process taught me a whole new list of cuss words I shouldn't use in front of small children.

As the name of the lake indicates, The Great Salt Lake is full of salt. Right now it is about 3 times as salty as the ocean. We often joke that if you drop a wrench into the lake, it will rust to nothing before the wrench lands on the bottom. That salt is not harmful to the sailboat as the hull is made of fiberglass. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the engine. Our little outboard engine slurps up water from the lake to help cool the engine. At the end of a day of sailing, we run fresh water through the engine to clean out all of the salt. After 19 years of sucking in salt, our engine clogged and I needed to take it apart to clean it.

We had the engine off the boat over the winter and had a local marine store service the engine. One of the things we asked them to do is replace the water pump. They did but they didn't replace the thermostat in the engine and I felt it might be the issue. When we put the engine back on the boat, it ran fine for the first 2 sailing trips and then gave us all indications that it wasn't being cooled properly.

Having replaced quite a few automobile thermostats, I knew the job is not that difficult. I got to the boat early one day over the recent break and pulled off the thermostat housing. Sure enough the 19-year old thermostat looked more like rust than any usable part. I pulled out the old one only to discover the new part didn't fit. I actually wanted to test if water was running through the engine and so I left the thermostat out, put the housing back on the engine, and started it up. There is a telltale that sprays a stream of water out of the engine and into the lake when everything is working correctly. Nothing came out. Knowing that you don't want to run an engine very long without a working thermostat, I shut the engine down, rinsed it off, and headed to the marine parts store. I worked with the manager there to use the serial number of the engine, which I had taken a picture of on my smartphone, and found the correct part. The correct part cost $6 less and so they refunded me the difference.

I didn't want to go back to the boat as the Utah sun was blazing away and being outside felt like being on the surface of the sun. Instead I came home and tried to take my mind off the fact I still hadn't fixed my engine. The next morning my wife and I got ready to head back out to the boat and see if we couldn't get it working. Before leaving home, I found a great YouTube video about fixing the cooling system on outboard motors. The guy narrating the video was from Australia and had an engine with a similar problem to mine. He tried a few things that I always try and had similar results. Then he gave me a small piece of information that I suspected but didn't know: not all of the water that cools the engine exits from the telltale. This effectively said that my engine might be cooling correctly and that the clog could be in the Y-valve where some of the water is diverted to the telltale and the rest exits the engine near the prop.

My wife and I headed to the boat armed with new information. I pulled off the thermostat housing and thoroughly rinsed the cooling path. I also followed the telltale hose all the way to the Y-valve and used compressed air to clean that out. I put the new thermostat back in and it fit perfectly. Then I started the engine and everything worked perfectly. An hour later, our children arrived ready for our annual tradition. YouTube is not just for fixing cars.