It would be so much easier if I could keep the boat at my house and work a little bit here and there, but each time I want to work on it I have to borrow my wife's SUV, drive the 3 miles or so to the storage place, hook up, drag it home, position it somewhere that the neighbors won't get annoyed (HOA says no working on vehicles in visible places....nobody's complained yet *fingers crossed*), then do whatever I was planning to do. Needed to make a parts run earlier today while I had the VST taken apart, didn't want to tow the boat to Home Depot & Oreilly and slosh fuel around and can't disconnect it on the street (city code), so I rode my bike
Always have to anticipate afternoon plans to and start wrapping up an hour or hour and a half ahead so I can have time to clean up and take it back to storage. Anyway...enough whining. Put VST back together and took the mechanical pump apart. No surprise given what came out of the fill hole yesterday, but when I separated the diaphragm from the pump side there was quite a bit of oily gas that came out. There shouldn't be any in this location. Checked the elliptical inside the seawater pump, it looks ok to me, so I'm going to go ahead and replace just the lift pump part for now and see if that helps out. If the problems continue in the future I'll explore further. Tired of smelling like gas
I don't understand why they did what they did with the VST system. It's like they wanted to keep it kinda like a carb system but then add EFI. Basically the line from the tank goes into the water separator, then through the mechanical lift pump, then up to the VST tank. The float you see in the pics above closes and opens a valve that lets fuel into the tank from the mechanical pump. When the level in the VST tank drops, the float opens the valve and lets more fuel in, then when it fills, the valve shuts off. The high pressure electrical pump draws from the VST tank and feeds the fuel rails and injectors. Unused fuel from the rails feeds back to the VST tank through the return line. All of this is happening right on top of the hot engine, so no wonder the fuel gets hot and vapor locks doing laps in the upper engine sauna.
I've read a lot of threads where people get tired of dealing with VST and replumb everything to be more like a car system, where the fuel goes from the tank, through the water separator, through a high pressure electric pump (note the missing mechanical pump and VST tank), through the fuel rails, then gets returned back to the tank. Seems much simpler and more reliable to me, but what do I know.
