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I did a welding course at Uxbridge college several years ago. When I was first thinking of building my own boat I thought that I had better go back to do a refresher course. Unfortunately the college has now gone 'I.T.' and no longer runs any welding courses. (Hmm- where will all those young lads learn to weld now?) They were just about to close for the summer in 2002 and all the welding workshops were being refurbished. I asked if perhaps there may be some equipment for sale. I was told to go to see one of the lecturers, who told me there were some welding rods that I could have for 'Err, say a tenner for the lot?' The lot turned out to be a wheelbarrow brim full of various rods. While I was wheeling them past a window I spotted an engine in one of the workshops. Everything else had been stripped out except this huge stationary engine. I asked if it was for sale and was told I could have it for £100 but it had to be stripped out and taken away very quickly. It turned out to be a Petter PJ3W of 1965 vintage. I checked with a local supplier, Marine Engine Supplies, to see if it would be suitable and was told it was a good choice at the right price. The only problem would be sourcing a bell housing and gearbox to fit it.

So I took a day off work and spent many hot hours undoing the long exhaust system and all the mounting bolts, and then manhandling it into the back of my Escort van. I then took it back to Andy's workshop where it would stay for the next year or so.

I stripped it down and did a top end rebuild over the course of the next year. I also had the injectors and pumps overhauled by Diesel Engine Services of Uxbridge. While the rebuild was slowly progressing I was keeping a lookout on the internet for a gearbox. I finally found one in Shireoaks Marina near Worksop. I detoured over to see it while on a cycling holiday in Lincoln in July (A very long detour!) The snag was, it came with another Petter PJ3 engine and the owner wanted to sell all together. I needed it so had to buy the lot, so I paid the man, bringing the gearbox home with me. I went up again at the end of September to get the engine  (I'm trying to sell this air-cooled PJ3 if anyone out there is interested.) Picture below, right.

I got it back home, left the gearbox in Andy's workshop and depositing the engine on a stack of breeze blocks at the back of my house. The bell-housing was a perfect fit onto my engine and the gearbox will fit okay just as soon as I make an adaptor plate to join the two

. I finished rebuilding the top end just before we moved the workshop from Uxbridge to West Drayton and its been under the trailer covered with a tarpauline ever since. I haven't even run the engine yet but there is no reason to think that there will be a problem.

 The air-cooled (Blue paint job)engine is also now at the yard. I have to fit the starter motor mounting plate from the water-cooled (Green paint job) engine and put the flywheel back on. Then I can run it to test it and hopefully sell it.

The blue bell housing can now be fitted to the (green) water cooled engine. I then have to make a mounting plate to fit the 'Self Changing Gears Ltd' gearbox to the engine. This will be a 10mm ring with holes drilled for the gearbox and corresponding holes drilled for the bell housing. The company that now owns the name 'Self-Changing Gears',  E and S Engineering were very helpful and told me the gearbox was made in 1956 and was a direct drive with no speed reduction. Not only that but they sent me ,free of charge, an original 1956 handbook for the gearbox.

On May 6th I decided to give some thought to the engine. I haven't looked at it since it was put on a pallet under the trailer over 18 months ago. I had to move various vehicles and bits of plant and equipment out of the way to get it out from underneath. This took about 2 hours. I then put the water cooled and the air-cooled engines side by side on a trolley. I have to do some switching about of bell housings, flywheels etc.

On May the 8th I got back at about 5.30 after a 'hard day' doing my accounts with a good friend and felt like doing some work on the engine. I turned the flywheel and was pleased that it turned fairly freely. I got about 8 litres of oil into the sump and turned it over by hand for a few minutes to spray some oil on the parts that are hard to reach. Andy and I rigged up a drum of diesel fuel and after bleeding up all the fuel lines we connected a battery and tried to start it. There were a few niggles until we got fuel flowing to the injectors. We then had to figure out what position the various levers had to be in to start and to run the engine.. Finally we got it running at about 8 o'clock. I hadn't yet filled the radiator so we didn't run it for too long. I then got out my Kamco Flushing pump.www.kamco.co.uk This is normally used for flushing radiators in central heating systems but I figured, why not? Its just another radiator and the engine is made of cast iron just like many boilers. I rigged up some reducers to connect into the top hose joint and turned on the flushing pump. It looked a bit like a colander,with water coming from every orifice! so I got out some tools and tightened up various nuts. I also removed the radiator and soldered about 6 different leaks. Then I reconnected the radiator again. This time when I turned on the flushing pump it circulated nicely, with no water fountains. So I added some FX2 descaling solution to the pump and circulated it through the radiator and engine for about an hour. Then neutralised it before draining again and refilling with fresh water.

The radiator will not be used when the engine is finally installed in the boat, so its only still attached while I test run it. The engine will be cooled by running the water through a skin tank welded to the side of the boat when its in its final position. After the flushing process was finished I ran the engine again for a while. The oil pressure gauge was showing nil pressure but after checking with Andy's test gauge I found it was faulty and the pressure was in fact about 50 PSI. I finally got to bed at about 3 o'clock. Lucky I don't have to be anywhere early tomorrow!

16th May. I spent every every evening since the above till Sunday 14th cutting and welding the stem to the front of the boat. Late evening on 14th I started cutting out the plates to join the engine and gearbox. Over the next three nights I cut out two rings from 12mm steel plate. This was a struggle because the plasma cutter is only designed to cut up to 8.5mm plate so they had "wobbly" edges but I can clean most of that off with an angle grinder. I am so impressed with this plasma cutter and it was well worth the money it cost.

I drilled the rings to match the holes on the gearbox and on the engine. I had trouble matching the threads on the engine.It wasn't Metric, fine or coarse, UNF, UNC. Someone in the past had rammed 10 mm nuts onto the starter motor studs and ruined them. It finally turned out to be BSF, a thread that is not much used nowadays. I finally managed to source bolts and nuts from APEX Fasteners on Ipswich Road on the Slough Trading Estate. I also put together the exhaust system and then ran the engine for a while. Much quieter!

18th May Julie and I are off to the Kelvin and Vintage Marine Engine Club's meet in Bugworth Basin in the Peak District this weekend. I have tried to get there for the last 4 years and am finally going. My engine qualifies as vintage. We will be under canvas (Nylon!) for the weekend so I hope the weather is kind.

What a treat to see some of the people I'd read about for many years in the Vintage Marine Engine Magazine. And what a treat also to see some of the lovingly restored engines. I was also very impressed with Mick Edge's internal fit of N.B.Bass. It showed great attention to detail and must have taken many hours of work.

I also made a mount for the bronze engine water pump. I had to connect gear wheels to camshaft and water pump and connected them together with a chain . Thank goodness I invested in a lathe all those years ago and then did a course to learn how to use it. I had to do lots of machining to connect all that up. I will have to make up some kind of a guard to cover the chain and to make some kind of oil bath for the chain.

The next step was to make a header tank. I cut this from an old copper water cylinder , folded and soldered it all up to make a tank to fit above the engine. The next step was to connect the skin tanks using 22mm copper piping from the header tank to the gearbox oil cooler, to the skin tank and then to the other skin tank with an L-port (one or both) valve linking the two. 

 21st February 2010
Well - here's a proper, good news update. I have fixed the gearbox leak. I blame poor eyesight for it taking so long. I asked Dan Hollands to come down and take a look. He's the boat engineer who works at Uxbridge Wharf. I explained the problem to him and we stripped off the drive coupling from the gearbox. The oil was being pushed up the splines on the inside of this coupling. He is a bit younger than me and when he put his head down level with the end of the gearbox, he could actually focus on what was in there . I, on the other hand couldn't get my head back far enough to focus because of the bulkhead. He said he thought the coupling should make a good seal inside and I suggested maybe filling it all with silicone mastic. He agreed that may be a good solution.
So after he'd left I cleaned all the oil off the coupling, nut, spacer and shaft with parafin. It was then I noticed a hole in the end of the shaft for a split pin. "Aha! thought I. I've never seen that hole before" I left the coupling off and just screwed the nut on. It only went on about 2/3 of the thread. The problem was that the thread was mashed on the nut. When I'd cleaned out the thread.it screwed in about 3/16th" further. I think the nut is not original because I can only see half the split-pin hole but then I remembered that there had been a loop of wire round this nut when I first took the gearbox apart. I couldn't see the purpose of it at the time but now realize it must have been because the spilt-pin hole was not accessible. Maybe later I'll take a bit off this nut on the lathe. This then made a good oil seal with the shoulder in the shaft. Problem solved!

I am still playing with bits on the engine. I have to machine an engine pulley to match the alternator pulley. The Alternator supplier sent me a 6 groove pulley but although it has 6 grooves, as does the crankshaft pulley it doesn't have the same size grooves, so I have bought a large square lump of aluminium about 35mm thick and as soon as those round tuits arrive I'll start machining it!
I finally got the cooling system filled up last October and have apparently fixed all the leaks. I've been saving bottles of water from our dehumidifier to fill the cooling system. I bought 18 litres of anti-freeze and added this to about 30 litres of distilled (dehumidifier) water, gave it a good stir and poured it in.
There is still an annoying oil leak on the gearbox. I haven't done anything to it for a while though. Its very cold to work on the cold metal engine at the moment.
 I looked at this page and realized I haven't updated it for ages. I'll have to have a bit of a think. Some of the updates went into the general boat build so maybe I'll have to do a bit of copying and pasting. Anyway I'll continue as if it had been updated regularly.

Now there's the charging system to sort out.
I am considering the electrics now. I will need more sockets inside when I start on the woodwork part of the fitting out. I'm using 2.5mm arctic cable and ordinary household sockets for the power supply. I have also run the gas supply from gas locker to the galley.
03 april 10
I spent another couple of hours working on the alternator pulley. Its coming along!

It started as a block 8" square. I cut 4 corners off with a grinder and covered my workshop in a fine layer of aluminium dust. Its taken about 4 hours to get to this on my little modelling lathe. Just got to cut some grooves around the outside now!
I've asked for advice from the model engineers forum 'cos my little lathe is struggling (or, rather, I'm struggling to cut the grooves around the outside!)
I've now made up all the battery cables to link the battery banks and positioned a battery commoning panel just above them. There are two isolating switches for the house and engine banks too. The main 12 fuse box and control panel will be just above this



18th April
I finally finished the pulley today. I wanted it to be as large as possible and to fit over the original pulley.
It took quite a few hours work on the lathe but It was interesting to do. I'm still not a very good machinist so its nice when something works out okay. Now I can make a mounting for my new alternator to be inline with this new pulley. The reason I wanted it as large as possible is to increase the speed of the rotation of the alternator to get as many Amps output as possible. I still have to make an oil bath chain-case for the water pump, so the pulley couldn't be any larger without impinging on that .
I do have smaller cogs and chain that could be used for the water pump so if I find that there just isn't enough room, I can use those. The water pump runs at half engine speed so as long as the cogs are the same size its the correct ratio.

17thJuly 2010
Its been a while since I updated this site. I did have to use the smaller cogs and chain in the end. The alternator pulley would have fouled against the water pump cog. I also made a small chainguard to cover the cogs and chain and act as an oil bath. It seems to work OK although you can hear a tinny noise as the chain slaps against the tin guard. I may have to tweak that a bit.
I had a battery box made by Zeus Fabrications and fixed the engine start battery just above the leisure batteries. These are all in a row at the end of the engine room, low down under floor plates.

The engine electrics seem to Ok. I have a Smartguage battery monitoring system fitted now. This is a system that controls a battery twinning relay so that if the module detects a charge being applied to the battery banks, be it from shoreline fed charger, alternator, solar panel or wind turbine- it will link the starter batteries to the 'house' batteries. If no charge it detected- it disconnects the battery banks from each other. This ensures that there will always be enough power in the engine start battery to start the engine.

September 2011
 I bought a thermostat housing from Tony Redshaw. It means the engine gets up to temperature quicker. Unfortunately it had a side effect. The gear box wasn't getting enough cooling water. The bypass on the thermostat housing was allowing too much water to short cycle back to the pump. I needed to think of a way of restricting the flow through the bypass so that enough water circulated through the gearbox oil cooler. I considered an electric pump to make sure enough water flowed through but decided against it. I wasn't sure how the two pumps would work when running together.

I have been reading some threads on Canal World Discussion Forums with the same problems. Someone mentioned a thermostat with a flap that closed off the by- pass but also mentioned that he hadn't seen one in years. I decided to try to improvise something. I did some careul measuring to see how much movement there was in the thermosat. About 8mm. Then I measured the housing to see how big the by-pass hole was and how much the moving themostat covered . Finally I cut out some small flaps in copper and did some experiments. It took three or four attemps to get the flap the right size and shape. Then I assembled the whole unit and put it in a pan of water. As it got hotter, the thermostat started to open. The flap moved smoothly across the by-pass hole. Unfortunately as it did so it exposed the other side of the by-pass hole. So, plan B.
I cut out a small half circle of copper and soldered it in the housing so that it covered the hole that was left exposed by the opening thermostat and flap. I fitted it back on the engine this evening but I won't be able to run the engine until saturday.