Painting around the cutlass bearing

[Steve Laume]

I am doing my short haul on Raven and making her beautiful in preparation for my summer trip. I noticed the shaft had a good bit of play and was trying to wish it away as I had replaced the bearing about 7 years ago. Jim Welsh came over and declared it a definite goner. It should not have failed so soon, so badly. The rubber appeared to have gotten hot enough to fuse some of the material onto the shaft. I am thinking I painted to grooves shut with a combination of bottom paint and the zinc spray I use on the prop. I am going to be very careful in the future to keep the end of the cutlass bearing free of paint from here forward.

Just a heads up to prevent someone else from doing what I might have done to kill the thing. If anyone has any insight on painting the cutlass shut I would be interested in hearing about it, Steve.

[Jim Walsh]

Just in case anyone was curious, Steve did a great job compounding, polishing, and waxing his hull. He did a nice job on his boot top and bottom paint also. He didn't mention that he also applied some Kiwigrip to his cabin top.
Discovering the slop in that cutlass bearing and replacing it should means several years of worry free operation.
It was fun watching someone else working on their Cape Dory.
We also got to see a red fox returning from the hunt with his prey. It doesn't get better than that

[JWSutcliffe]

Steve:

I would tend to think that its more a case of you putting more time on the cutlass bearing than most. 7 years isn't bad given a reasonable amount of use. Most of the sailboats ( or power boats, for that matter) at my marina rarely leave the slip. It's a cheap part, albeit a pain to replace, but just one of those things.

[Steve Laume]

It seems the alignment was not all that great either. I hope this one lasts a long time as I am sore as all get out from leaning in over the engine to do all sorts of work back there. Seriously time to consider a deck hatch for this nonsense, Steve.

[Dick Villamil]

Do you leave the transmission engaged in reverse when sailing or do you let the prop spin? The spinning could cause undue wear on the cutlass bearing..........perhaps we shouldn't go there again - just a thought!

[Matt Cawthorne]

Stuffing boxes were designed to stop water where no other simple system would. If we could just slop some paint on the back of the boat to keep water from coming in, we would. I would suspect that it would be impossible to keep the cutlass bearing from being wet enough by applying paint.

Regards,
Matt