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Old 06-19-2010, 11:24 AM   #49
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
7 years without any attention or maintenance

Eric---

I agree with you and this is one reason we have not pursued the installation of the sump valve/drain setup. Pretty hard to go wrong with a big bolt in the pan to keep the oil from leaking out.

Also a friend who sold his boat awhile back gave us the Jabsco electric pump-on-a-bucket thing he'd purchased for oil changes.* It still pulls the oil out through the dipstick tube but at least I don't have to keep pumping up (or is it down?) the vaccum level in the extraction pump we used previously.

Another modification some people have made to their FL120s is the installation of a drain valve on the bottom of the engine's Simms injection pump to make the 50-hour injection pump oil changes faster and easier. If one installs the Johnson raw water pump on the engine there is no longer enough clearance for any sort of drain valve setup under the injection pump, so it's not an option for us. But I wouldn't do it anyway for the reason you state--- the lower the risk of something dumping its lube oil, the better.

The injection pump is another thing I hate about the FL120, by the way. It was a state-of-the-art design at the time (mid-1950s) but today it's just a pain in the a*s. Not so much the fact the oil has to be changed every 50 hours--- it's an easy job that doesn't take much time--- but because of how careful you have to be when you do it. The threads in the drain and level holes are very soft. I don't believe the pump body is cast from aluminum, but whatever it is, it's a pretty soft metal. So it's very easy to strip the threads in the two holes, at which point the plugs no longer fit tightly. And if the drain plug backs out, that's the end of an extremely expensive pump--- it's the singe most expensive component on the engine to replace or rebuild.

This is the reason it's imperative to use a new soft (our shop recommends aluminum) washer every time the drain plug in particular is replaced. This helps ensure that the plug will make a good seal and stay seated firmly in the hole without needing the kind of torque that could damage the threads. If you don't use a new soft washer, the old one gets compressed and then it starts taking more torque to seat the plug securely and you get that much closer to the point of thread damage.

In today's world, it's a very bad design execution, and is one of the several reasons I never recommend to anyone that they buy a boat with an FL120 in it.* At least not one with an FL120 and the Simms injection pump, which unfortunately is most of them.* The FL135 does not use this particular type of injection pump. It's similar, but it's lubed by the engine itself so the whole 50-hour oil change requirement is eliminated.

A few people I know of have modified their FL120s so that the Simms pump gets oil circulated through it by the engine, but the setups I've seen to do this have struck me as being pretty Rube Goldberg in design so we have stayed with the stock setup and I'm just real careful when I reinstall the plugs.

The Simms pump doesn't always say "Simms" on it, by the way.* There apparently was some merging and aquisition activity during the period the Ford Dorset engine that is the base engine for the FL120 was being made.* So if my memory is correct, it started out as a Minimec pump, then became a Simms pump, and then became a CAV pump.* This pump was, of course, a component installed on the base engine by Ford of England.* It's not part of the Lehman marinization kit.* So the Dorset engines used in tractors and combines and cranes and whatnot all had it, too.




-- Edited by Marin on Saturday 19th of June 2010 12:42:13 PM
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