The Drink and Piss Method

How long does it take to change a boat engine's antifreeze? About 6 weeks. That's how it goes on a naked boat.

I discovered that you shouldn't mix different types of antifreeze. After that, I discovered that pink antifreeze may be bad for seals in older diesel engines. Lastly, I can't open the little tap that drains the coolant from the engine block.

I couldn't open the little tap with my bare hand, even after soaking it with DW-40, and I'm not about to use a wrench. It's hidden behind the oil filter in a hard-to-reach place, and snapping it would imply a major headache. In this stage of the game I need less pain and more pleasure.

After finally finding blue antifreeze at an auto parts store, I got to work using the drink and piss method, which is not painful at all.

Pee into the pan please.

The whole Kubota engine takes 7.5 l of coolant. Because I can drain only about 3 liters from the coolant tank, I decided on the following procedure:

• drain the coolant tank
• refill it with distilled water
• run the engine until the tank is hot
• shut the engine down and let it cool
• drain the coolant tank again
• repeat the process 8 times
• in the last operation, uncouple the long hose connecting the heat exchange to the engine to remove another 1/2 liter
• pour 3.5 l of pure blue antifreeze into the tank, run the engine to mix it up.

One more drink and piss operation and I can finally add the antifreeze and move on to the task of scraping the propeller and checking the bottom growth. If it's really bad I may haul out this year.

In the middle of all this drinking and pissing I took a trip to Gibraltar, to be covered in my next post.