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I feel your pain Aardvark. I recently replaced exhaust elbow on my 2GM20. The part cost $546.75 plus GST. 😫 Corrosion of these things is insidious and inevitable. I will be checking mine annually from now on.

You are not the only one reviewing the cost of boats on marinas...

a friend was in the first group to windsurf teh strait, and the first woman ot do it. She now wingfoils and is teaching Mrs Aaardvark to do it. https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/surfsail-1978

Engine driven fridges use an eutectic storage plate. The compressors are always an order of magnitude more powerful than the biggest 12v system. Thus they freeze holdover plates in under 20minutes when power is in abundance. Run the engine once in the morning, freezer/fridge are done for the day and if you're not careful you've frozen your beer. With electric you'd get rid of the engine driven compressor and switch to an electric compressor (another thing you need to factor in). If you stick with a holding plate, this requires you to get into the habit of leaving the fridge

Sorry I misread 10m LWL as 10m LOA hence my discussion of 28ft waterline. 10hp may be a bit low. I overstated your cruising speed being too high, you're probably not pushing hull speed hard at 6 knots but 5.5 is still much more economical. As a rule of thumb we recommend 1kw per tonne of displacement to get the boat up to hull speed in calm conditions. Most of my analysis was based on the displacement rather than the length so the suggested 5kw electric power remains valid but a 10kw or 15kw would not be a bad idea to give you extra power in reserve for bad weather. There's not a huge dif

Bad advice IMHO. Diesels like running at about 80% of their full capacity, a 20kw genset would be specced so that the diesel in it is running at about 80% when producing the full 20kw electric output. If you don't run it at full output (and you never would even with propulsion, cooking and an electric heater all at once) then the exhaust gets all clogged up with soot. 15kw is overkill for this size boat. 5kw is adequate to reach full hull speed in calm conditions. The rest is extra power to push into strong wind and waves. Nice to have in reserve but not often used. If you

I had a ss one made. Lasted a good 7 years, and just starting to fail now. I gave them the flange to work off and they did the rest for about $120. Well worth it.

It's impressive that after 47 years or so the working parts are likely still good and it's only corrosion that's getting the better of it...I use a small Foundry for one-offs at reasonable prices in my engineering work . A possibility is to replace the casing half (or halves) and save on doing any other mods/retrofitting. Perhaps send me a pm if that interests you.

I know a bloke on a cav who switched the engine to a yanmar and couldnt find a v drive to suit so got two big toothed alloy cogs made up and found a toothed belt to suit,looks like a harley davidson belt drive system.Works great dont think he has replaced the belt in years.

Yep, no problem. Think I have one in my van... The bearing holder unscrews, take the unit down and take it off.