angus99
Guru
We started our northern portion of the loop a couple weeks ago with a goal of having the boat here in Tennessee before winter.
From the start, both Lehman 135s produced more gray (not blue gray) smoke than I’ve seen before. I talked to Brian Smith, who basically said the cause was hard to determine and that he wasn’t too worried about it.
We ended our first leg in upstate NY where I had the boat hauled to check a vibration. While there, I thought I’d get a mechanic to check the idle on both diesels which has been rough.
The mechanic said we have algae in the fuel and sent me a photo. This was a surprise since I run out of a day tank and any fuel going through the engines is filtered through a paper towel roll filter before it goes into the day tank. He said the engines are starved for fuel. He wanted to polish the fuel, change out the primaries and secondaries and add Biobar — then sea trial it to see if that stops the smoking and if it improves the idle.
I changed out all the fuel filters 70 hours ago. The aft day tank is clean. I saw almost no vacuum on the Racor gauges while underway and I wonder if fuel starvation is the right diagnosis.
From the start, both Lehman 135s produced more gray (not blue gray) smoke than I’ve seen before. I talked to Brian Smith, who basically said the cause was hard to determine and that he wasn’t too worried about it.
We ended our first leg in upstate NY where I had the boat hauled to check a vibration. While there, I thought I’d get a mechanic to check the idle on both diesels which has been rough.
The mechanic said we have algae in the fuel and sent me a photo. This was a surprise since I run out of a day tank and any fuel going through the engines is filtered through a paper towel roll filter before it goes into the day tank. He said the engines are starved for fuel. He wanted to polish the fuel, change out the primaries and secondaries and add Biobar — then sea trial it to see if that stops the smoking and if it improves the idle.
I changed out all the fuel filters 70 hours ago. The aft day tank is clean. I saw almost no vacuum on the Racor gauges while underway and I wonder if fuel starvation is the right diagnosis.