lwarden
Guru
Just throwing this out for discussion and rant.
I have a Westmar hydraulic bow thruster and it has a main shaft that is badly corroded due to a PO not properly maintaining the zinc. My boat is a 2002 and I did the last haul out was 2 years ago, so the boat was roughly 20 years old at the time. During that haul out I planned to service the bow thruster so ordered a rebuild kit from Wesmar in advance. My first worry was their customer service rep was new and had difficulty determining what kit was needed. She stated this was an old unit, I don’t consider 20 years to be “old” and would expect you could still get parts for it. In the end a universal rebuild kit was sent and during haul out I pulled the entire unit out and found output the shaft and prop had severe crevice corrosion. I immediately called Wesmar and asked for a replacement shaft and prop and they said they don’t service these old units anymore, so I was out of luck. I was stuck with a problem since I had already pulled the unit and had a lot of work to do before re-launch. I had to do the best I could to make it workable till a longer-term solution was found. BTW, despite the shaft corrosion there was no perceivable water in the lower unit so the guts were good.
JB-Weld to the rescue. I ground out what I could and filled it in, smoothed it out and put in a new set of seals in, greased it up and hoped for the best. Same thing for the prop. I made up a little pressurized oil filling system to keep the lower unit under pressure in case the fix didn’t last to prevent water getting in. Amazingly, two years later the oil level in the pressure rig hasn’t dropped, so the seal and shaft repair held up and the thruster has been working fine.
The long-term plan originally was to buy a complete new thruster (not from Wesmar), but the tunnel size is non-standard so I can’t find a direct replacement. It’s possible I could make one work, but it would require a lot of work to the tunnel, and it’s a nasty place to do fiber glassing. Back to Wesmar now asking if I could get the engineering drawing so I could have and new shaft fabricated. Nope, we have no drawings anymore for these “old” thrusters says customer services. Really? They just threw out all the drawings for older units? What company does this?
What I did get was a PDF of the parts diagram and when the unit was apart, I documented all the bearings and gears and scaled the pdf to make a CAD layout, then created my own engineering drawing. I have a quote to get one made by our local marine prop shaft shop using Aquamet A22 for about $700 so that’s the route I’m going when I haul this fall. The stainless prop will get welded up since there appears to not be a replacement to that either.
The point to this long story is (besides a bit of a bashing of Wesmar):
I have a Westmar hydraulic bow thruster and it has a main shaft that is badly corroded due to a PO not properly maintaining the zinc. My boat is a 2002 and I did the last haul out was 2 years ago, so the boat was roughly 20 years old at the time. During that haul out I planned to service the bow thruster so ordered a rebuild kit from Wesmar in advance. My first worry was their customer service rep was new and had difficulty determining what kit was needed. She stated this was an old unit, I don’t consider 20 years to be “old” and would expect you could still get parts for it. In the end a universal rebuild kit was sent and during haul out I pulled the entire unit out and found output the shaft and prop had severe crevice corrosion. I immediately called Wesmar and asked for a replacement shaft and prop and they said they don’t service these old units anymore, so I was out of luck. I was stuck with a problem since I had already pulled the unit and had a lot of work to do before re-launch. I had to do the best I could to make it workable till a longer-term solution was found. BTW, despite the shaft corrosion there was no perceivable water in the lower unit so the guts were good.
JB-Weld to the rescue. I ground out what I could and filled it in, smoothed it out and put in a new set of seals in, greased it up and hoped for the best. Same thing for the prop. I made up a little pressurized oil filling system to keep the lower unit under pressure in case the fix didn’t last to prevent water getting in. Amazingly, two years later the oil level in the pressure rig hasn’t dropped, so the seal and shaft repair held up and the thruster has been working fine.
The long-term plan originally was to buy a complete new thruster (not from Wesmar), but the tunnel size is non-standard so I can’t find a direct replacement. It’s possible I could make one work, but it would require a lot of work to the tunnel, and it’s a nasty place to do fiber glassing. Back to Wesmar now asking if I could get the engineering drawing so I could have and new shaft fabricated. Nope, we have no drawings anymore for these “old” thrusters says customer services. Really? They just threw out all the drawings for older units? What company does this?
What I did get was a PDF of the parts diagram and when the unit was apart, I documented all the bearings and gears and scaled the pdf to make a CAD layout, then created my own engineering drawing. I have a quote to get one made by our local marine prop shaft shop using Aquamet A22 for about $700 so that’s the route I’m going when I haul this fall. The stainless prop will get welded up since there appears to not be a replacement to that either.
The point to this long story is (besides a bit of a bashing of Wesmar):
- How long do we expect a company to provide spare parts for things like a bow thruster or other major marine systems?
- How long would you expect a company to keep records, diagrams, etc. for their products?
The unit I have is pretty well made so I really would hate to throw the baby out with the bath water.
