EXCELLENT stuff above, everybody! As I read all those comments, I recalled my history with diesels and how I learned to take care of mine. I wish there had been a good course of instruction nearby when I bought my Grand Banks 42 in 1986.
Besides being an "operating engineer" in 1965-6 on 80-foot patrol boats equipped with four Detroit 671s where I certainly did NOT ever put a wrench to one, my earliest experience of diesels in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s included merely the knowledge that there were emergency diesel gensets aboard the ships (mostly destroyers) I served in. Then I was the deck department head in a ship with a number of diesel-powered landing craft the maintenance of whose engines was not my job - my guys just ran them. After that I commanded a Fleet Tug with four big 16-cylinder Cat D399s for propulsion and smaller Detriots for electrical power - again, I was not directly involved with maintenance.
After all that, truly knowing little about them, I bought a boat with two diesel mains (Ford-Lehman 120) and a diesel genny. Luckily, I inherited a smallish bit of my father's mechanical ability and combined with reading boating magazines of the day and talking to mechanics and others I was able to flesh out a maintenance plan and began to diagnose insipient problems before they became big problems. When you think of it, there are only a few, but important, things the "average" owner can do to maintain boat diesels, but after three decades owning that boat, I had performed way more involved tasks on the engines than the normal guy would attempt. In all that time, never did I have a mechanic aboard for engine work except once to help extract a broken exhaust system bolt from the head.
THEN I changed boats to one with a high-revving, turbo charged (new to me) Yanmar with difficult access to the engine. This was 2015 and looking at all of the above comments on available training courses I wonder why I was not smart enough to seek out one for new-to-me engine because I was truly initially intimidated by it, and I studied everything I could find on it. The old Fords cruised quietly and comfortably at 1600 RPM while the Yanmar is happy ROARING along at twice that RPM. Through places like Trawler Forum and the sadly defunct Boatdiesel.com, I learned of some catastrophes with my engine and how to prevent them. Early on, I had a mechanic perform a couple of critical, preventive maintenance actions and carefully watched his every move to learn to do them myself. Staying in touch with others who have this engine has been very helpful, and the Yanmar main and the NextGen generator and I have since settled into a comfortable relationship where we all do what is expected of us.
None of my experience has been with common rail or electronically controlled engines, and I think I am glad I do not have complications like electronics to deal with.
All the above blather about learning engines does not even touch on the kind of everyday work that goes into maintaining a boat which vastly exceeds engine maintenance, and there are lots of courses and YouTube videos out there on that stuff you can look at now.
boathowto.com
