Hi im new to this and this is my first post. sorry for lots of detail , i hope someone could help me with this problem, i have a 27ft cruiser with a 1.8 bmc on shaft with conventional stuffing gland. recently i have had an engineer replace the flexi hose because it was showing signs of breaking down. he repacked the gland, checked for wear to gland, shaft and cutlass all ok. we refloated the boat. whilst running the engine in gear for 20mins i noticed the gland was very hot too touch and no matter how i slackened the packing gland i was not getting a drip at all. convinced it had been packed to tight , he came back repacked it checked shaft alignment. it was still getting hot so we rang a well known manufacturing company of these stuffing boxes and he said if i could hold onto it comfortably for 5 seconds it was ok and explained about a hot cup of tea and how you proberbly wouldnt be able to hold that at all , he did however tell me to keep an eye on it. I used the boat for 1.5hours today at about 1200 revs adjusted so i was getting a steady drip (bit more than id like but im obviously trying keep it cool) i stopped added some grease nearly stopped the drip, good i thought!. When i check the temp it was even hotter!!, say two seconds and then i had to let go . there is no smell or steam and i dont know if this was getting hot before because i never checked it. Now my question is....... am i worrying over nothing , does any one know what sort of temp it needs to reach before stainless steel and bronze starts to suffer !!! i am the sort of person that likes things just so and it just dosent seem right !!! any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. fantastic forum by the way i have solved many problems and learnt so much just by reading other posts. (Its the bronze type with two studs with nuts on them)
thanks in advance james