Tuesday, July 23, 2013
We took a 3-mile bike ride to a Napa store today to pick up
the alternator belts. As mentioned
before, the original belt had to be replaced because the guys at the yard had
set the alternator so that it was at its maximum point of adjustment. As belts age, they wear and stretch and
naturally become looser, so when this happened to us, we weren’t able to
tighten it any further. This belt
not only runs the alternator, but it also runs the fresh water pump that cools
the engine down. If this shits the
bed, the engine overheats and has to be shut down. No good. The
same problem happened to us when we came back from Bermuda to NY on a Swan 48,
only that time, the belt actually broke.
In our case, we noticed it in time; we had turned the engine back on and
heard a high pitched squealing. We
were able to shut off the engine and save the belt. During our hour-long bike ride, we got to see some pretty
houses on the back roads of Morehead City. The streets themselves were lined with beautiful dogwood
trees and fragrant rose bushes, which made the ride quite pleasant.
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| Dennard's closet |
That reminds me,
ReplyDeleteSince I don't know how old the belts are on my engine, I was thinking to replace them and get some new spares too, or use the current ones as spares.
Sounds like sound thinking to me, it never hurts to have extra belts laying around
ReplyDelete