Drippy, our drip-less shaft seal

We have had problems with our dripless shaft seal since night one of owning Jelanea. You may remember that on our first night in Portland, ME, our stuffing box was dripping into the bilge. What a way to start boat ownership, with sea water making itself at home in your boat.

We were able to stop that drip fairly easily, by turning on the engine and putting the boat in gear we freed whatever was causing the drip.

Dripless stuffing boxes work by pushing a carbon stator against a stainless steel rotor the carbon plate is held in place by a rubber bellows that is compresed to create pressure.

Foreign material can get into the seal between the carbon and the rotor and create a leak. This is typically solved by either running the engine in gear, or flushing the system by hand compressing the bellows.

When ours started to leak while underway on Tuesday, we figured this was the issue and tried to flush the debris out. When it was fine for the next few days we figured we had fixed it.

But on Saturday we couldn’t get the water to stop flowing in, no matter what we did. After contacting our friends in Brio II and the manufacturer of our shaft seal, we decided that the bellows needed to be compressed more. They must have relaxed with age or been worked a bit loose over use.

In order to fix this we needed new set screws, that hold the rotor in place. As we were nowhere near civilization all day Saturday, we simply kept moving knowing the bilge was filling with water. Our bilge pump did a great job of keeping up and keeping our boat afloat.

We decided to stop in Belhaven, NC, mostly because there was a nearby hardware store.

Of course, since we arrived on Saturday evening, the hardware store wouldn’t reopen until Sunday at 1pm. As most other things in this small town were closed all day Sunday, we were glad the Hardware store was open at all.

I had gotten the correct screw dimensions from corresponding with PSS shaft seal, who manufactured our stuffing box.

Once we acquired the correct parts, we set to work fixing the problem.

Each rotor is typically set with 2 screws, and then an additional 2 screws are sink into the same holes to keep the bottom screws from working their way out.

I had thought we only had 1 set of screws I each hole and removed them with an Allen wrench. We had marked the prop shaft with a sharpie to know where the rotor started. Our goal was to push it aft 1/4 to 1/2 inch to compress the bellows and stop the constant influx of water.

After removing the 2 set screws both of us tried to push the rotor aft to no avail. There isn’t a lot of space to get at the prop shaft, but we pushed with everything we had. Our hands, our feet, nothing would make it move.

Finally I decided to double check that there weren’t a second set of screws still holding it on. Sure enough there were. I removed those ones and tried pushing again.

Still no movement.

I checked that there wasn’t a third set screw (there wasn’t). Not sure what else to do, Ben got a mallet and a spare board. He squeezed himself under the hot water heater and somehow found enough clearance to swing the mallet into the board which was laid against the rotor. A few good swings and it finally moved a little over 1/4 of an inch.

The dripping instantly stopped. We could see another sharpie line on the prop shaft, most likely indicating where the rotor should have been set.

Another problem solved!