Flushing with ear muffs

[Grumpy]

I am unable to find any reference to this topic on site here so I apologise if it is old hat .
I find using a barrel of water sometimes cumbersome and difficult to dispose of when the need to replace occurs.
Using older rubber ear muffs as used by owners of modern larger o/boards I have found a solution that appears quite good and cheap and perhaps easier and possibly cleaner , or it appears so.Today........
Taking the one ear muff with the hose attacment I have cut it to fit over the water intake of my century and silver centuries, between the top screw of the gearbox cover and the cavitation plate.It has a natural bend in factor and using 2x plastic tie ons 190mm long keeps it on tight.
Smack it on the support, hose on 1.5 to 2 turns of the hose, water pressure in my taps u/k, and away.
Water flogs everywhere as with every ear muff but the water circulation is great.
The noise is delightful, not one seagull but it sounds like 1/2 a dozen.All barking together.
Have;nt thought thru every angle yet but I'm pleased as punch so far.
Perhaps the exhaust may get hotter due to no water contact but its onle short time.
Replacing the plastic ties is not a major economic cost and the time involved is acceptible to me. Quite quick actually.
While in truth oil is oil is oil the tipping of my flush barrel is like a visit from the Exxon Valdez.
Took pictures but until my son visits I can't get the attachment thing working.
I hope and pray its an not old rejected idea.
Cheers.































o
Cheers.

[Grumpy]

And of course you do not need to take the prop off which I find annoying .

[Grumpy]

And of course use 290mm or 12in cable ties NOT 190mm

[Hugz]

The only concern I would have is the hose forces water in, so one cant check the sucking/pushing ability of the pump.

Good idea, nevertheless.

[Grumpy]

Fully agree .It is not suitable as a means of finding water circulation problems.
One would have to resort back to either the flush tank or while actually boating to make judgements there.
I've been trying it out even since I put the post up a few hours ago and I've become more than happy with it.
Have been thinking lately about doing some testing on what vol of water is actually going through a seagull and how to go about it.
Lots and lots of factors and variables .
Also shows up how important a person I am in society when my mind has to turn to this to justify an existence.Halelujah
Mind you, I apologise for all the spelling errors in the post, reckon besides getting older and more decrepid hour by hour the old brain and eyesight are close to burnout.
Not enough lager perhaps.On that subject I've been given a recipe of soaking raisins in gin for a week and eating 9 every day to alleviate arthritus.The raisins are quite nice so 9 a day is no problem but its the drinking a bottle of gin with them that is becoming tiresome.Too much of a good thing.English gin mind, made with juniper berries.
Can a person be had up for being drunk in charge of a seagull? My Swedish friend Flink Fiskmas reckons not.
Anyway, back to the story, the actual time to set everything up is about the same as taking the prop off etc so unless someone comes up with other good reasons not to I'm going to stay with it.
But will remember to keep a closer eye on the water flow when on the water.

[Ian Malcolm]

Back-flushing with a hose adapter to one of those push fit plastic tubing connectors shaved down to fit in the cooling water outlet is perfectly adequate as our favorite engines don't use a positve displacement water pump. and a lot cheaper and simpler. Just don't open the tap too far as you only want water coming out of the bottom driveshaft vent, not higher up!
Reverse flow is also better at shifting mud,sand and weed.

[Grumpy]

There is no doubt that back flushing is the best way to clear obstacles throughout the water system, especially when a total blockage is apparent or suspected.
That has become obvious to me reading on site.
However is it still the best system day in day out when just flushing the outboard after normal use. In the days long ago when I used to have larger mercs or johnsons the flushing was performed to remove killer salt deposits and not other debris and thats what I am thinking now.
Yesterday a friend mentioned that when he was out in the back blocks for weeks he always back flushed his seagull by any method. because it was easier to get water into the outlet than inlet but always reverted to normal flushing when home.
I recall reading on site that a seagulls waterways are really more of a bath system.
Anyway I'm going to go down the shed today and see what I come up with doing it your way.
Anyone want to but a pair of munted ear muffs.?
When one thinks of it the old boys who created these magnificent machines perhaps they spent less time developing the cooling system than the rest of it.
Thanks and cheers.

[Ian Malcolm]

I have even run Seagulls on back flush. A VERY wet process but at least the hose doesn't get eaten by the prop!
One does need to be a BIT careful however as you are filling the jacket from the top so may have some trapped air.

As the only part of the Seagull cooling system that is aluminium is the pump chamber, Seagulls don't have the same 'salt' deposit problems as more modern outboards. Once Aluminium has turned into a mixture of hydrated aluminium oxide and chloride, you are well and truely sunk, especially if its blocking the small galleries of the cooling system or roughing up the surfaces in a rubber vane pump chamber. However with a Seagull, unless its got so bad the block is falling apart internally, the deposits are always likely to respond to acid pickling e.g. with kettle descaler at high concentration (usually good because it eats scale but is buffered not to eat significant amounts of metal) followed by thorough rinsing and a phosphoric or tannic acid pickle to inhibit the iron surfaces then soluble or steam oil and getting the block warm enough to drive off any moisture.
PLUS there are no inaccessible fiddly bits between the pump and the block. IMHO many modern outboards could do with COPYING the Seagull cooling system - maybe with a somewhat closer tolerance pump that could move some water at idle.

[Grumpy]

Thank you Ian.
I made up my feed line , in your image, and then ran a WS with water going in the outlet, and not fast enough to come out the small holes up the drive shaft.
Everything seems hunky dory
I definitely do not like the flushing tank for regular use.
Mind you I;m going to be using both my water devises, mine and yours, as I see the need or just for novelty.
Got 50 x12in cable ties today for $NZ5 which equates to 2.5 pound and pleases me.
My time does not have an excessive value on it now, not that it ever did.
Its quite good though , finding out all these things.
I have never been a great mechanic, just an avid handyman, but already boating people I sometimes mix with are starting to comment on my new found knowledge.
I'll play it quiet and take the glory and revel in it.
As they say though " A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing"
I still marvel at the info that comes off this site.
How did the world operate without it.

[charlesp]

The lime scale dissolver may work with limescale, but it doesn't work with the rust/silt concrete that clags up the waterways of the Seagulls in Poole Harbour.

I have tried dissolving the stuff in a glass jug after chipping it out of a block, and it doesn't fizz, that goes for Oust, Kilrock, Coop's own, and a couple of others.

The other disadvantage of trying to dissolve the stuff out is that the solvent only acts where it touches. So you never know if the job is done properly. It's not good enough just to have water coming out of the tell-tale hole, it should be circulating and in contact with all those chambers in the block..

[david]

Try leaving it in a bucket of coca cola

[charlesp]

Coca cola or anything else for that matter means you can't see how much you have removed. Just clearing a passage for water through the block isn't enough. It's an improvement but not a proper jo.

[Horsley-Anarak]

I believe that the only way you will clean the water passages is to use a hammer and small chisel.

I use a small electrical screwdriver which fits perfectly, you need to get right to the bottom of the passages

You will be amazed at the pile of rust that is removed, and as Charles says the rust is not easily dissolved I have tried all sorts of chemicals and sand blasting.

One thing that I have found is that the cylinder walls can become very thin and fragile.

Some engines have had some flow, but the cylinder is damaged because in other areas the rust pressure has burst the casting.

So even if you improve the flow with some sort of flushing, you may still get a damaged cylinder in the future. This is because of the rust pressure in the areas that will not be cleared with flushing.

Cracks can be repaired with epoxy, I have a century that has lasted a couple of years with no sign of failing.

So I would say take the head off and chip away.

H-A

[Charles uk]

Gentlemen, Charlesp & I have both taken bits of water jacket concretion, collected during declagging Century cylinders with a hammer & screwdriver, & have tried every possible chemical available acid or alkali to see if any of them can dissolve or break down this clagg with little or no sucess.

The only one that I had any joy from was a sample I got from Henkel metal chemicals that they use for cleaning out sea water injection pipes in undersea oilfields, this in a heated form did completely clean out a cylinder after pumping it around the water jacket for 6 weeks, but in the areas that came clean first started to dissolve the cast iron leaving a finish that looked like sandblasted soft wood, with very a pronounced grain effect, & about a 3mm height difference between the peaks & troughs in the worst areas. Little effect on copper none on aluminium.

As the degridation was in the high heat & high pressure areas around the combustion chamber we decided this product was a failure to!

[Ian Malcolm]

*NOTHING* short of hydrofluoric acid or violent percussion will shift a mixture of baked on Poole harbour mud and rust. The local mud is high in organic content including naturally occurring crude oil, fine silt and clay (think Poole potteries and the Wytch Farm oil field) and if you add iron oxide to the mix the result is far tougher than most forms of concrete. As hydrofluoric acid would far rather dissolve you from the inside out, the rest of the engine, and the local enviroment, I don't want to be within half a mile of anyone daft enough to try using it on a Seagull, and upwind at that!

However I have had very good results with kettle descaler on the more normal corrosion deposits we get on the East Coast. e.g. freeing off totally seized spinny pole ends, screw down vents, blocks, misc. deck fittings + the aforementioned engine flushing. It also is good for softening up and loosening barnacles, but unfortunately doesn't do much to the glue they secrete under them.

When you buy a Seagull, unless the water flow is EXTREMELY healthy, it probably needs the hammer and screwdriver treatment, but once you have it cleared out, 'pickling' it every couple of years will help keep new deposits under control.

As our experts point out, if your chosen 'pickle' doesn't fizz, it may not be doing much good, though I suspect that the pipeline flush didn't remove much metal that wasn't rotten to start with. Under certain conditions, enough of the iron can leach out along grain boundaries of a casting immersed in seawater to remove all structural strength from the metal even though it is still the same shape. I have seen diesel heads that could be whittled away with a blunt pen-knife! If your casting has degraded till it resembles a loosely sintered block of iron powder mixed with graphite flakes, just about any acid will dissolve it faster than the concretation.

P.S. if you are running on back flush, PLEASE open the tap enough to get a LITTLE flow out the lower driveshaft drain hole! You DON'T want insufficient cooling . . .