The Light At The End of The Tunnel

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel? Or is that a train headlight? After the heat exchanger is reassembled, I head off to West Marine, on foot, with a planned stop in Sailor's Exchange (worth the stop) and another stop in AutoZone for an electric fuel pump. I return with some parts from each location, including 36ft of fuel supply hose, four 3-way valves, and various other parts. Back at LUX, the system takes a few hours to implement. We replace all the fuel supply hoses on the port engine. The hand pump bulb and the main feed lines are connected to a 3-way valve, allowing us to select either supply feed and to also use the hand pump to prime all the lines. The intermediate setting of the valve connects all three lines together, allowing us to pump fuel down the main supply line as well as through the primary filter and into the fuel lines to the engine. The engine runs fine with the new system! We're finally ready to leave St. Augustine. We take a break for lunch at the local Greek/Polish restaurant and walk around the shops for an hour or so. It is a nice break from engine work. We all agree that St. Augustine is a neat town, with a lot of museums and galleries that warrant a future stop with more time to spend.

We depart St. Augustine on June 3, heading up the coast towards Charleston. The port engine exhibits some periods of rough running. We now have the option of choosing a pickup and of pumping fuel with the hand pump. The periods of smooth water coincide with a smoothly running engine. Periods of rough water, particularly when the seas make LUX roll, coincide with rough engine running. Since we've not been able to run the engine much, we have 7/8 of a tank of fuel (45 gal tank). At 3/4 gal to 1 gal per hour of fuel consumption, we will need to run a few hours to get the tank near empty so that we can inspect it. The tank does not have an inspection port and the fuel gauge sensor will require some investigation to determine how to get it out of the tank. So far, we've not determined how to remove it so that we have the whole access port for inspection - a port that's only about 1.5 inches in diameter.

We're north of Charleston, SC on June 7, and the port engine started with its problematic operation. We quickly went to the hand pump bulb and found that it was soft. The fuel level is down to 1/4 tank and the bulb feels like it is sucking air. We have been wondering how long its pickup is and whether it goes as deep as the main fuel pickup. There seems to be a sump in the bottom of the fuel tank under the main fuel pickup. We installed the electric fuel pump and it pumped air. Do we have an air leak or is the tank empty. The fuel gauge reads 1/4 tank, but we've not used LUX enough yet to know if it is accurate.

Muck in the Port Tank

We decide to open the port fuel tank while under way to see how much fuel is in the tank. The gauge reads 1/4 tank. How much fuel do we need to pump out so that we can see the bottom of the tank? Mike is able to get the fuel gauge sensor removed from the tank and we're able to look inside. A dip stick shows about 1/4-inch of fuel. There is a thin layer of bio muck in the bottom of the tank.  A baffle prevents us from viewing the fuel pickup area. While there is a sump in the bottom of the tank, there is no drain in it and it does not coincide with the location of the pickups, either the main pickup or the priming bulb pickup. So it seems that our problem is likely due to bio-muck. We had recently purchased bio-cide to treat the diesel and we add some to the tank to kill whatever is living in the the small amount of fuel that remains.

The Starboard Tank Is Much Cleaner!

On our first leg, we had run the port tank down to 1/4 tank, which is where it is currently reading on an empty tank! So perhaps part of the problem was picking up bio-muck from the bottom of the tank, plus stirring up the muck when the tank ran down to a really low level.

We calibrate the sensor so that the fuel gauge reads full and empty at the two extremes of motion, also checking that the half reading is also correct. It has a float that can be adjusted, so we make the adjustments so that the fuel gauge reads correctly. It will read full when the tanks are about 5 gal from being 100% full. Leaving that much space at the top of the tank is probably a good idea anyway. With the port tank now calibrated, we had to do the same to the starboard tank. We found that it was much cleaner in the bottom.

For other Leopard owners, the fuel tank breather hose on both tanks has sagged and tends to collect fuel in the dip. When adding fuel to the tank, the fuel in the breather tube is pushed out and winds up in the water if we're not careful. Supporting the hose so that a dip doesn't exist will take care of the problem.

To Be Continued...