Steve, I read with marvel at the thought that you put into your systems. I also spend far too much time thinking about systems and I know of nobody in the industry that has it to your level. I’m just surprised about one thing…engine cooling. You go to great lengths to cool your AC and
\nrefrig. using the “internal keel coolers” in order to eliminate all of the saltwater usually associated with it, but what about the engine? Why not
\nkeel cool that? I have always felt that the weak point of these engines is
\nthe belt driven rubber impeller pump and all of the intakes, strainers etc.
\nassociated with it. I know that you are going to say that it adds heat to
\nthe engine room, but my Nordhavn 40 was really quite cool with a keel
\ncooled dry exhaust engine. With an aluminum boat, you could even cool
\nthrough the skin.<\/p>\n
An even better solution comes from the late Phil Bolger. He once drew a
\nunique boat that used an oil\/air cooled Deutz engine. If you are not
\nfamiliar with it, these engines don’t have antifreeze as their coolant.
\nThey curculate their lubricating oil and air cool it in order to cool the
\nengine. To me, it would be the ultimate…get rid of all of the usual
\nthings associated with heat exchanger cooling and even eliminate the
\ncomplexity of a keel cooler….heck, they even eliminate an entire
\nfluid…antifreeze. Are you familiar with these?<\/p>\n
One other unique engine that could be nice for the new 64 is these Steyr
\nengines that have an integrally mounted electic motor\/generator. During
\nnormal operation that generator could supply all of your DC needs without
\nneeding an additional belt to drive it. In an emergency, it could be
\ndriven as an electric “get home” motor powered off of the generator. I
\nthink this could be a nice solution for a single engine boat.<\/p>\n
Allan Salzman<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hi Allan:<\/p>\n
We have given the wet exhaust Vs. keel cooled lots of thought, and go into this in detail elsewhere on t he website. The bottom line is that there are maintenance trade offs with both systems. Wet is quieter, gets rid of condensation issues, eliminates hot stack fire risks, and is much cleaner. Part of the answer is having an easily accessible gear driven raw water pump, dual large capacity strainers, and a system for easily clearing debris from the raw water\u00a0 intakes. If you replace the raw water pump every 1000 hours (and then rebuild it) you are ahead of the maintenance cycle. The Steyr engine with genset built in is interesting, but we much prefer the Deere engines for their known qualities and world wide service.<\/p><\/div>\n
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