Hi!
I have a Volvo Penta MD 2010 with a gearbox MS2A. Last week I was doing a small maintenance checking the seawater hoses system for any blockage (I was not happy with the flow) and suddenly the engine seawater cooling system stoped running, there is no water at all coming through the exhaust at the moment. I found a small leak in the seawater pipe connector inlet/outlet that gets into the gearbox that might got worst when I was disconnecting the hoses, also some object may have moved and got stocked inside the gearbox cause the seawater is not comming through the gearbox outlet pipe. The engine and it?s gearbox was working good before that, starting at first try and not overheating.
At this point I can?t go sailing with a failure enngine, so I decided I it is time to replace the corroded gearbox seawater pipes, the gearbox flange and the coupling too, as you can see the corrosion in the first picture. The original VP spare parts for all this job are too expensive for my budget and they need to be backordered from Sweden, so I found a second hand gearbox but the model is Volvo Penta MSL2-D. Our engine VP engine manual says that the default gearbox for our engine is supoused to be the MSL2-D so I am wondering what is the reason of having a differente gearbox model onboard.
Does anyboady know if the gearbox MS2A is compatible with the MS2L-D? I could not find any information online.
Thanks in advance for all the sailors taking the time to read this, as a first boat owner this forum and sailing community is really helpfull.
Matias
Mateus,
Your pictures did not show here but I had a look at them on the YBW forum. The sudden stoppage of seawater cooling is unlikely to be anything to do with the gearbox cooler. If it was a sudden stoppage it might be something as simple as a plastic bag sucked up against the intake. Take the hose off the outlet from the saltwater pump and start the engine and check the flow of salt water. Stop the engine as soon as you have done this, the small amount of water in the boat won't hurt. If there is no flow the intake is blocked or the impeller in the pump has broken off a couple of blades. If there is plenty of salt water flowing then the blockage is most likely from calcium build up in the heat exchanger. If it's a calcium build up get back to me.
I would just chip off the rust and treat the flange and leave it alone.
Hi Ramona, thanks for your advise and taking the time to see the pictures at YBW forum!
I think I found a provisional "solution". I did a step diagram of the seawater flow system in our engine to identify the issue and be able to fix it, it is:
1) Seawater skin fitting intake
2) Gearbox seawater inlet/outlet
3) Pump/impeller inlet/outlet
4) Heat exchanger inlet/outlet
5) Elbow and exhaust system outlet
I had a clue that the issue was in the step 2) because there was no seawater flow pressure coming from the gearbox seawater cooling outlet pipe. There was no way to access the gearbox pipes to fix them, I was only able to touch them and check that they were corroded, probably with a bad mix of leakage and inside blockage, I unsuccessfully tried to use Silka to stop the leak.
After spending some hours reading in forums about the MS2 gearbox cooling pipes and other people having similar issues with corrosion and leakage, I decided to bypass the gearbox seawater cooling system and connect the sewater intake hose directly to the impeller inlet, surprisingly the amount of seawater coming throught the exhaust is better than ever, looks like the heat exchanger and the rest of the main seawater cooling system is workingfine!!
Without a sewater cooling system in the gearbox, I need to start monitoring that the gearbox oil does not overheat after long engine runs. It is not the best solution, but is the one I found and I can afford, without having to remove the engine and disamble the gearbox.
With a "working" engine again, I can go sailing again that is the main reason of all this endless project :)
Defintely the next maintenace task will be removing the rust and corrossion from the shaft coupling and gearbox flange and see if they need to be replaced or not.
Cheers!
Matias
I doubt whether the gearbox will be any problem with out water cooling, it's just a piece of pipe going across the gearbox. The majority of small marine gearboxes don't have any water cooling.
Next time your running the engine, after a few minutes put your finger on the face plate of the saltwater pump and check that it is cold. It will probably have some condensation on it as well. Mostly when there is a small flow of coolant out the exhaust there is a build up of calcium in the heat exchanger. Another spot if you run the engine at idle with no load for long periods is the exhaust where the salt water meets the hot exhaust gases. When this happens there is a loss of power and the engine wont rev.
