steamraiser2

about £100 to test and calibrate, £200 to strip and rebuild plus parts. A truly clapped pump needing elements & bearings and delivery valves etc could easily get up towards £600. Hard to estimate until its is stripped and checked

Not really. We get pump camshafts made these days. So it's not the end of the world. We recondition quite a lot of these pumps for our own and customers engines. The fuel injection side of the business is fast catching up with the engine restoration and parts business it seems

One spring is for speed control the other is meant to damp the action of the other to prevent hunting at tick over. Over complicated for no good reason. I wonder if one/ both of the springs is/are stretched or of the wrong poundage always assuming that its not simply an air in fuel issue.

You are right in your assumptions. You really should get someone who knows about your engine to show you the ropes. It is very easy to come unstuck. A little initial assitance will set you up I'm sure ?

Crankcase venting on LWs is sometimes through the filler cap, where a vent filter is provided, or through venting in the rocker covers If you haven't got either the crankcase pressure will build up for sure. If your engine is one of the many asthmatic Gardners out there the blow by can be considerable. Back in the day we drilled an tapped the covers on our 6LWs in the Fodens and ran hoses out behind the cabs to carry the fumes away from the drivers Anything to avoid spending money on the trucks.

Are you sure that you have the correct dipstick? Only ever seen a similar thing when a gearbox was overfull

During my days as an apprentice there were three commonly used torque settings : half a grunt, a grunt and a grunt and a half.

The current cost of carrying out the conversion of a JP to electric start is around £1300 for the flywheel machining , ring gear and starter motor and mounting bracket. Pallet freight and boatyard costs are extra of course. We have done quite a lot of these both 23" and 26" types. The CE will be much the same depending on the size and availability of the correct ring gear. If you are able to remove the flywheel and get it on a pallet yourself its not that an expensive a job overall. If you are dependant on a boatyard it could add a significant extra cost. The £1300 is for new parts not second hand items.

Welding fuel tanks is a fools game if you don't take proper precautions. Don't take a chance on it without considering a foolproof way to do it. If you take yourself back to school and remember the science class where they taught you the triangle of fire. 1/ fuel 2/ air/ 3/ heat (ignition source). With all these present the chances of a spectacular end to your day is very likely indeed. I have fond memories of a colleague attempting to braze a leak off pipe connection back into a Lister fuel tank on a dumper. He used all the dodgy justifications for excessive risk too. The resultant bang and cloud of smoke and flame was spectacular indeed. The scorced face less so. It was a blessing that he had his goggles on. However these days its easy to provide an easy remedy to your problem by breaking the triangle of fire by removing one or more of the elements. Personally I would empty the tank, it's an opportunity to clean it out anyway. Ensure that the filler cap is securely shut and remove the tank vent. Use that connection to connect up the regulator hose from an inert gas bottle. Nitrogen would be my gas of choice but I have used the Co2 hose from a mig welder before. Add gas from the gas bottle at very low pressure and fill the tank with it. No fuel, no air, no bang. Weld away. Dont forget that if you do manage to start a fire and hurt yourself or damage something the insurer will call it misadventure and probably not pay out.

As Martyn said, end float and detectable lift on the crankshaft. Any end float above a few thou is generally a pretty good indicator of a developing problem.

The core of your problem is the throughput. A vehicle stat, or even a Cat D9, will be too small. What you have is a Spirax version of a Mason valve, not common and very expensive. It may be worth contacting Woods of Crediton. They have a yard full of ex Royal Navy parts and may well have something to suit.

I would have thought that a 3LW would not produce enough heat to make this run efficiently. I think that Jones the Nuke is on the right track when mentioning the condensation and black soot which is sure to follow. We always fit a decent thermostat system to the engines (dozens and dozens over the years). This enables the engine to run at the optimum temperature which narrowboat engines seldom do and, once warmed up to supply hot water to one of the calorifier coils. This always works well. The heat loss through the calorifier system is usually significant with the result that the engine stat seldom fully opens and it is unusual for cooling water to circulate through the skin tank except when thrashing up a river etc. The other thing to bear in mind is the need to prevent circulation through the engine related part of the circuit when the engine is off. Engines make splendid heat sinks and will cool the water in the calorifier overnight.

Look out for the anguished wailing when someone posts a soundtrack of their beloved engine and promptly gets told that that it's clapped. No owner is happy hearing that ?

Dave , I hadn't noticed your request for dimensions. Drop me a pm with your requirements and I'll measure the one newly arrived here.

CE2s have a one piece rocker cover so I think it could be a CS...not a common engine in a narrowboat

It's a JP1. We had a marinised one of these in our show trailer a few years back. There wasn't a JP1M built. Ours had a Velvet Drive gearbox

No it wouldn't. Its fine for alternators, water pumps and compressors but drive to a gearbox will need a proper drive flange.

Fitting a drive pulley to a marine JP is easy peasy. We use a drive shaft adaptor that replaces the large flywheel nut. To this we fit a taper lock pulley and boss sized for the speed and alternator type. In fact, By Ecks engine shown in an earlier response has such a set up. We have fitted dozens of them over the years. Standard on our marine JPs and converted JPs

Easy enough and,yes,you will have to drain it down.

An easy fix and not an uncommon place for a leak. A little gasket goop is probably the easiest route. Check that the pump to crankcase mating face is ok, sometimes they need a thicker joint or a shim

I suppose that it is possible that either a: the old oil filter was a 20 micron element and the new one is 30 micron or bigger or b: that a bit of carbon / debris/ fluff etc has been displaced and is affecting the pressure relief valve so that it is leaking back a little. Assuming of course that the oil pressure gauge is working correctly.

If I were you I would stick to the SAE30 as Gardner recommended. The key is using an oil of the correct detergency and viscosity. In my experience what you are noticing with the multigrade is the oil behaving how a multigrade should. It behaves like a thin oil when cold and a thicker one when warmed up. I have always found that engines run on the correct grade and viscosity changed at regular intervals always do better in the end. Gardners are pretty basic machines by modern standards. Good oil and good fuel and they will usually run on for years and years. Flushing them can just as easily be done with either the straight or multigrade oil it will make little difference so,either or. Back in the day we used to flush the truck Gardner engines with SAE10 oil bought in for the purpose. It had an additive in it, no idea exactly what it was. An hour idling in the yard was the procedure, You could not load the engine up at all. I suspect it was nothing more than oil cut with diesel or kerosene maybe. It certainly washed them out well. Used to catch the drainings through a fine filter looking for whitemetal etc. With the advent of full flow oil filters we stopped doing it as the modern high detergency oil we used in the Ford and Perkins engined stuff kept them spotless anyway. So the Gardners just got an oil change on a Saturday morning prior to the driver giving the truck a wash. All the fleet got this at least once a month. It worked as many of the Fodens were 750000 miles plus without any major repair work.

You are on the cusp of the grade change between temperate and tropical zones. If you are between the temps you quote most of the time you could consider changing to a SAE 40 oil. Finding some could prove a challenge although I suspect Morris Oils could help you. If your oil pressure drops as you describe when the temp is lower you need to consider the oil relief valve setting and the general wear and tear of your engines bottom end. Gardners running in tropical temps do not normally object unless they are well worn.