Our last engine service was just before crossing the Atlantic east to west in Cape Verde. Part of any long crossing is making sure everything on board is in tip-top condition so you don’t get any surprises in the middle of an ocean, so, for us, it was time for another engine service.

For us, this meant doing the following on our Volvo Penta D2-40:

• Changing the raw water impeller & filter
• Changing the fuel pre-filter & filter
• Changing the oil & oil filter
• Changing the coolant (but we will leave that for another day)

The engine in Hannah is beneath the cockpit floor, which in some cases is quite convenient, but reaching some engine areas it can be a bit of a challenge, but most boats will have this for some part of their engine…

Although we picked up a new fuel pre-filter in Gibraltar, we didn’t fit in on our last service, so time to change the fuel pre-filter for the first time!

The fuel pre-filter is made up of multiple parts:

• A metal mounting plate, which includes the connections for fuel in and out
• A cartridge that contains the filter medium itself
• A collection housing for various bits and water that are filtered out of the fuel
• A metal base and bolt that holds all of these components together and also includes a small screw release valve to drain water from the bottom

First, we unscrewed the drain plug to drain the excess fuel from the filter into a little container.

Then we unscrewed the top bolt that held all of the components together, and they all came apart in a little tower.

The fuel that we drained from the collection housing was already quite full of bits. And the filter itself was also clogged up with all kinds of gross stuff.

The raw water intake can get all kinds of stuff coming in from the sea. On Hannah the through whole is not covered by any sort of mesh or filter, instead, the filter lives inside the engine bay. But this makes it very easy to regularly clean.

The filter had all kinds of bits of seaweed and plant life in it, probably not enough to impair water flow. The impeller also looked like it could do with a bit of a rest/replacement.

The oil change also went smoothly after heating the engine up and making use of our 12v oil pump.

Both the main fuel filter and oil filter were replaced, the air was removed from the fuel system using the small manual priming pump on the side of the engine, we started her up, and everything sounded great!

We will get back to sailing in the next post 😉