After selecting the new engine, it was time to get the old engine out. The previous year, I had done a complete wiring diagram. I knew that it would come in handy after I put the new engine in place.

This shows the front of the old engine, with most of the accessory gear removed. Alternator, pulley, exhaust pipe, and air cleaner are gone.

Here I have removed the rest of the accessory gear, including the muffler and the exhaust tube. The shaft coupling is broken, so we won't worry about that. One or both of the mounting brackets on the bell housing will have to come off before the engine will fit through the hole.

Here my friend John is working the engine up through the hatch. We shackled the boom vang onto the engine. At this stage I prefer to use the saw horse instead of the boom, because it gives more control. Once we get the engine through the hatch, we will slide the deck panel under it, then pick it up using the boom and the main sheet. I think the engine weighs about 190 pounds stripped down like this.

Here we have set up the boom and the main sheet to do the lifting. We are using the main halyard to trice up the boom. Notice that we have the sheet block mounted where the halyard supports the boom. We do this so that we don't put this spaghetti boom into a bending mode. We want compression only. The sheet and halyard are tied off such that they will not slide forward.

Once we have the engine up above the coaming, we will take down the life lines and swing it outboard. Naturally, we double checked the boat stands before we started this. If we tipped the boat over, the marina owner and the other boat owners would have us killed.

See how easy it is? Next time we will do it in the dark, just to make it a challenge.

Pretty nasty looking eh? All this stuff has to come out. When I was cutting things out, I accidentally cut the depth sounder transducer wire. Oops!

This bed design leaves much to be desired. This one cracked on the forward port edge. I spoke with other owners who had similar problems with beds cracking. Since I planned to move the engine forward slightly, these beds had to come out. When I cut them out, I noticed large areas of dry glass fiber between the hull and plywood frame. It looked like they made it like so:

Lay down lots of dry glass.

Place wooden frame on glass

Cover with more dry glass

Spray the whole mess with resin.

After curing, trim rough edges.

I felt that these beds were definitely not up to the construction standards for the rest of the boat.

Here I have cut out the engine beds. I used a sawzall (reciprocating saw) with a 12 inch crushed carbide blade. This was very effective on the glass. For grinding I used a small, high speed grinder with a 4.5 inch masonry wheel. This too was very effective. All the area around the beds has to be ground down, including the extensive pockets of dry glass. A standard disk sander also came in handy. I used the fender to stand on.

The pictures do not show the shaft log area, but this I had to grind out also. Working in this tiny space was slow and frustrating. The itch factor was a 9.7 on a scale of 1 to 10.