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Removing the Diesel Engine

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How do you lift a 130 kg engine out of a boat? I'd never handled a combustion engine before, and wasn't sure how I'd go about getting it out of the boat. I have a 20 hp Yanmar GM-3 diesel engine, weighing about 130 kg dry (more with oil). I've seen engines in ads resting on pallets, but I don't know how regular people normally move them around. My original plan was to use the mast crane to lift the engine, but I didn't have time to do that before taking the boat out of the water for the winter. Plan B was to ask the boat wharf to use their tractor to help me, but they didn't want to (they didn't have the administration set up to charge individual members for help). Then I spent some time building a simple, temporary "boat house" out of lumber scaffolding covered with a tarp. Plan C was to use lift the engine, hanging it from the wooden scaffolding, then pull out the boat (which is on a boat trailer), lower the engine onto a movable trolley, mov

The Grand Plan

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The Grand Plan My project starting fall of 2020 will be converting a classic 100 year old wooden motorboat from a diesel powered engine to electric power. I've been considering a project like this for a while, and the Coronavirus winter of 2020 seems like a good time to start. I'm Swedish but writing this blog in English, in the hope that it will be helpful to a wider audience than if I wrote in Swedish (forgive me, Swedes!). But some links will point to Swedish web pages (forgive me, non-Swedes!). Feasibility Boats use more power than cars, because of the need to push a lot of heavy water aside to move. My first step was to investigate if a reasonable combination of speed, range and cost could be achieved. Use Case Twenty years ago, two friends and I owned a boat called Koggen , a wooden motorboat with inboard engine. We used her for both longer trips in the Stockholm archipelago and for shorter 'picnic' tours around the city. The goal of this project is to have a boat