Grease for shafts

[Russell]

I am curious as to wether any CD owners gease their prop shaft or rudder stuffing boxes at all?

Many prop stuffing boxes out there have a greasing nipple on them, our spartin ones do not. I have not ever greased mine and I use synthetic no drip packing material, grease may actually be harmful there, I dont know. But I am curious to hear if anyone out there uses grease at all?

This comes up mainly due to corrosion I found on my rudder shaft just above my rudder stuffing box, which I mentioned in a previous thread. I had a mechanic come out the other day, just to go over a few things with me on some areas of the engine I was not as confident in (mainly the tranny), while he was there I asked him about the corrosion on the rudder shaft, and he said it was normal, and to just scrub it off with a scotch-bright pad then grease the area. Sounds reasonable to me.

So, to grease or not to grease? I wonder as well if some sythetic packing may actually be harmed by it. Though my rudder stuffing box I would be suprised if the packing was not origonal, and thus flax. I do intend to follow his advice on the ruddershaft, but it got me to thinking about the prop shaft, which on many stuffing boxes is obviously intended to be greased. What do you all think?

[Trawler Joe]

I just repacked both with GFO Gore (goretex) packing material, which explicitly says that no grease or other lubricant should be used.

I had just a small bit of corrosion, and did exactly as you were advised -- scotchbrite took it right off and it looks like new.

[Mark Yashinsky]

I believe your rudder shaft should be stainless steel, correct? If so, how how is it corroding? If it is SS and "corroding", would think its more likely to something above the shaft, corroding/rusting and dripping down onto the SS rudder shaft and drying on the shaft. When you cleaned the shaft, was it difficult the get the corrosion completely off and was the shaft rough/pitted/looks like a layer of metal is missing? What mettalic items are above this point in the shaft?

[Trawler Joe]

Maybe corrosion isn't quite right -- it looked more like a little rust. I don't think it was simply residue from the old packing, however. It came right off with little effort and looked as good as new.

So you're probably right, it probably was not corrosion, but did seem to be from the shaft itself...