In line with my philosophy of owning and running Soraya I believe I should be able to maintain, repair and upgrade as required all aspects of the boat. This does not preclude other people but I try to be self sufficient. In January I serviced the Deutz Turbo engine. Part of the service was obviously an oil change. These engines do not have a drain plug on the bottom as traditionally cars have. Instead they have a valve system with a manual hand pump to pump out the old oil. I carried out the service as normal but was surprised to find how little oil I pumped out. There again I was not 100% sure of the capacity and used oil looks like used oil. Service done for the year.
Yesterday I was giving Soraya the once over in preparation for our departure on Monday. I had the engine running and dropped it into gear. The propeller turned very slowly and stopped! Very unusual. After looking at the Morse controller, the cables, the connections, movement of the clutch accelerater etc. I could not find a fault, however, still no reliable propulsion. Oh la la!
The engine sends the power to a combined hydraulic clutch/gearbox. This is surprisingly named 'Dong-I'. On checking the oil level I found it was empty. Very strange as there are 'no' leaks. I then had a eureka moment. I realised I had back in January inadvertently pumped out the gearbox oil not the engine oil. This can be easily done as the valve at the hand pump was not labelled ( it is now ) and a slight turn selects either the engine sump or the gearbox sump. No problem refill with oil. What oil? After a lot of internet research and various conversations I talked to the UK agent and he stated it had to be SAE 30. No multigrades. You probably have not tried to buy a single grade oil, if any. Well I can assure you it's all multigrade now. I asked other barge owners and they did not know where to buy it. Eventually after hours of calls and driving round Dijon I located some in a boatyard in Saint Jean de Losne about 35km away. So empty oil container in hand and onto the train and a ~2 kilometre walk to the shipyard from the station. I had to take a container as the boat yard only had 200lt barrels.
My walk back along the river Saone to the railway station, with the SAE 30.
Oil obtained, levels restored and all good. The good news about all this is that the gearbox oil needed changing this year so now all done ahead of schedule. I was also amused when talking to a hotel barge owner about where to buy the oil by the fact that his engineer had done exactly the same thing recently on his boat. Made me feel I wasn't totally mad.
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