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Changing Evinrude Prop Shaft Seals

In this video I cover remove the bearing carrier from the Evinrude 150, remove the prop shaft oil seal and reinstall a new propeller shaft seal.

Changing Evinrude Prop Shaft Seals – Video Transcript

Hey there, Dangar Stu here, in today's video we're going to be changing out the prop shaft oil seal in the Evinrude 150.

I've got to confess I filmed this video on Wednesday, it's now Sunday morning, I went to edit it and realized I hadn't pressed record for the beginning section. So I'll show you that bit that I missed and then we'll push on. You can tell this isn't original footage because now there's a misfiring Pajero in the way, but we'll get there. Does anyone know what Pajero means in English? The bit I missed filming was simply removing the little locking tabs, I'll show you that now. As I think we noted in an earlier video, this outboard is missing one of its locking tabs but the bottom one here we will take off and it's just held on by little half-inch fastener. Once that fastener is out you can just lift the little tab out easily. Once you've got those two retaining clips out, which in my case only had the one, you need a puller to pull the bearing carrier out.

This is the puller I'm going to use, it's just a sort of block like this with a fine thread high-tensile pin in the center. I've got some threaded rod here which I'm going to cut in half and use as the two arms that go into the bearing carrier to pull it out. This threaded rod is 5/16 in diameter and 18 threads per inch as the thread pitch. The manual says the threaded rod should be 290 millimeters long. This is going to be 500 long if I cut it in half, so a little bit too long but I can always cut it down later. It will be quicker just to do a single cut now. I got in trouble last time for cutting this without nuts, because I just used a thread repairing kit I've got, but you don't have one of those I'll show you how I cut it. I measured this threaded rod and it was 900 millimeters long so I'm just going to 450 in the middle here, then I've got two nuts. I'm just going to do a cut between the two nuts to start with. With our raw cut here, you can see we've got a bit of a lip there so I'm just going to file that down. The next thing I do is take this nut and wind it off till it's almost all the way off to about there. It's sort of deep in there, just wind it back on again then I'm just going to do a really light file of anything that the nut sort of pushed through.

From there it should feel reasonably nice coming all the way through. All right, the other end is the factory end so no worries there. I'm now going to do the exact same thing to the other cut end and we'll start putting it into the gearbox. I've got two nuts per threaded rod so what I'm going to do is take the second one, put it on the cut end and then I'm just going to tack weld it on. This will give me something to put a spanner on to thread it into the bearing carrier. If I didn't have that I'd just be relying on my sort of finger grip on the threaded rod to get it into the gearbox. If it's not going in easily you should probably use a tap to clean the thread or something like that, but I figure it's not going to hurt. I'm going to wind this nut a little past the end of the threaded bolt just to give it a cup to fill. I melted one of the edges of it a little bit but it will still do the job. Because the gaps in this puller are quite large compared to the threaded rods, I'm going to go see if I can find a sequence of washers. They're going to help with this. I might have to step up through a few different sizes of washers which might make it a little bit weak, but we'll see how it goes. I'll sort of double up where I need to, and it may get a bit messy, but hope it'll do the job. Failing that I'll just cut some steel plate and drill a hole for this to go through and just make a single strong washer.

It's pretty ugly but what I've done on the end is step up through three different sizes of washers with two of each. That should do the trick. I've also just realized that these nuts on the end here fit through this plug which is actually good, it means that down the track I can make myself a large single strong washer, then put a second nut on the end here to sort of bind it all together and just keep it a sort of a bit of a custom tool. I'll finish that up sometime and I'll post a photo on Instagram. I'm just going to double check the rough distance I need. It's about right, so as I thread this in I want to go all the way in because I want it to be as strong as possible. If you only go a handful of threads in you run the risk of the puller just stripping those threads. I'm going to bring these to the puller rather than the puller to these because I want to make sure that they're even and that the puller is going as straight as possible. I think that's about right. I'll get a socket for here and see how it goes. If it doesn't look like it's going to come out I'm going to start heating the gearcase a little bit. This particular puller has a 22 mil hex on the end which is interesting because it's actually the same as a prop nut on a Yamaha so that's kind of handy.

I'm going put a bit more pressure on this, just sort of keep some load on it to stretch in the bolts and then I'm going to put a bit of heat on the gearcase. There's a fair bit of tension here now. Just put a little bit more tension on there and keep heating, it doesn't look like it's budging yet. When I was spraying before, I was spraying the bearing carrier because that's the bit you want to cool and have shrink, whereas you want the outside casing to heat and expand. She feels like it's starting to move now. I'm just going to put the rattle gun on the end, yeah there we go. It is still pretty warm, so I'm going to let that cool off. In the meantime though I'm just going to take these threaded rods for the puller out. I know people are bound to ask about this puller and I actually can't remember where I got it from. It does have on here OTC 522 so that might be something you can google if you're looking to find a similar puller.

I found this one is pretty good so far. I don't think it was sold as a marine one, but you can have a variety of sort of hooks and threaded rods and things. And the great thing is it's just really strong, so this will never be the thing that fails. It's really well-made. This section here looks very �anodey�. I can't see any fasteners here but I presume they're just buried, so I might brush this up and see if we can see how this is attached. It's probably worth replacing it while we're here. A bit of wire wheeling is revealing some fasteners under here, some hex bolts. This is the inside edge inside the gearbox, this is the outside edge where the prop is here and this is the oil seal we're looking to remove. We'll take this one out, it's interesting that rather than a stainless spring this had a nitrile o ring in it. I don't know if that's an Evinrude thing or whether somebody has sort of done the aftermarket thing like I sometimes do where you take a non marine oil seal, take the mild steel spring out and replace it with a with an o-ring. This is actually feeling pretty stuck so I'm going to put the bearing carrier in the vise so I can get a bit of leverage on it. Not too bad then, only a single oil seal on these Evinrudes. I'll clean up that inner edge where it goes as well, just using a little bit of brake cleaner there to clean away some of the old carbon, old grease and some of that emulsified oil.

I ordered the parts for this project online from a company called MarineEngine.com. You can see up here, that's a company in the states. They came within about two weeks to Australia so that was really good. What's even more exciting is I've been talking to MarineEngine.com about them sponsoring the channel and so far that looks to be happening pretty soon. That is sort of a bit of exciting news.

At the time I ordered all of these parts I didn't know that was in the pipeline, so let's sort of push on for now. We'll crack this open and see what we've got. I'm already thinking I forgot to order o-rings so we'll have to get a few other bits and pieces but I'll show you what I did order. I'm always amazed that these o-rings don't melt when you heat a gearbox like this. You're crazy not to replace them but they don't look particularly damaged at all, they've just got a bit dry grease on them. There's our prop shaft seal, there's a part number there and what we've got here are some o-rings which I believe are for the shift shaft so we'll definitely be doing that as well. These are numbers but they've got the part numbers on them so I can look those up again to be sure where they go. Here we go, good, so this is the packing slip and this packing slip has those numbers and what the part actually is. It looks like I did actually order one of these o-rings. I think I might have ordered the outer one but not the inner one.

I think they're the same size so I'll consider seeing what condition these are in. I should have ordered two, so that's my bad. I'll open the prop shaft seal, the one we just removed. I'll compare it to the original one and we may as well install that. Same diameter, same profile, just going to put a little bit of marine grease just on this outside edge to help it sort of slide in. I'm going to start by using a 36 mil socket because it goes over the outside section here to push down on this lip until it's flush. This socket won't actually fit inside but it'll give us a good start to getting it in and getting it square. Now it's in flush around here. I've got a few options, one is a socket that will fit through, but it's putting all the force on this loop that's not very strong. I think I'm going to use a punch and just keep going around, around, and around until it's in as far as it can go and it's square still. Going around just sort of step back a moment and have a look and just make sure it is still squared, if not just focus on the higher side for a little bit until it is. Having thought a little bit more about this o-ring situation, I do have one brand new one I ordered, I should order two but one of them is actually in really good condition of the original ones.

Now I'm going to put the best of the original ones at the aft end of the bearing carrier because sealant goes on here but as well as that, water comes past here into the exhaust when the motor stops, so this isn't sealing the gearbox. This one is so I'm going to clean both of these grooves up, I'm going to put the new one in the end that seals water from entering the gearbox and then I'm going to put the best of the original ones into this end just to seat the housing there and I'm pretty comfortable that's going to be fine. To clean these I'm just going to use a little bit of brake clean and a brass brush. Looking here in the manual this sort of confirms what I was saying about the o-rings in that our model has an o-ring here and an o-ring here but other models only have one o-ring at this end. This end doesn't actually keep water out of gearbox so I'm happy to have the old one here and have the brand new one at this end. Just putting the two o-rings back on the housing, making sure I got the right one in the right place. Then it says to put a little bit of grease on the new o-rings.

With regard to the anode the service manual says to replace it when it's about a third worn. This is about a third worn, I'd say it's on the cusp there but I don't have one and this really is about doing this video so I'm going to push on and we'll keep this anode for now. We might replace it next service for example, but we've now got the o-rings, the new one on the gearbox side, grease on them and the new pop shaft oil seal installed. Now that the bearing carrier is back together I'm going to pop it back in before it gets dirty lying in the workshop. Before I do that I'm just going to clean up the prop shaft and the inside of the gearcase housing where the o-rings going to seal against. And when this housing went in it was the two bolts top and bottom and the anode on the bottom. It's a tight fit, there's no doubting that so I'm going to get some wood onto here I think just so I don't damage it as I sort of drive it in. We'll know we've gone far enough in when there's enough room for this little locking tab to drop in again.

The nice thing is there's a little score line around the inside here as well that lets you know that it's in square so that's always nice. Okay, this one is in far enough now so I'll put the little locking tab and its' bolt in but I'm still going to order one because one is missing on the top here, not that I think it's about to fall out in a hurry. That's about all I've got time for tonight so we'll wrap it up here.

I'll probably do the video on painting Pauls' outboard because we've already started that. As I said last week we ended up with the wrong color paint. I went back and it turns out that's the only color they sell now. They don't sell the old sort of gray/ brown color they use to use. So Paul's taken the apron to a paint shop to get it color matched and get a couple of cans made up so we'll push on and get that done next week. The week after that we'll push on and do the drive shaft seal and the shift linkage seal, also while we're there doing the drive shaft seal I'll most likely have an impeller kit for this as well. We may as well throw one in, it looks pretty good and I wasn't looking to spend a fortune to see whether this motor was running but now we've had the problems, fixed the problems, come this far we might as well do it. Alright well thanks for watching and I'll catch you soon, see ya!