Tuggers,
Rie and I had a wonderful visit with Joe and Arvilla Glinski this winter. They told us about their superb trip on "America's Great Loop" around the Eastern half of the United States. They showed us their Lord Nelson "Tug Trek Trophy" that they are pround to have. During our visit we noticed that Gilinski's boat OUR VILLA (56) and our boat KEDGE (43) shared four mutual failures. The two boats have logged similar numbers of hours with OUR VILLA slightly under and KEDGE slightly over 6000 hours. A list of these failures is provided below. We thought these four failures provide areas of concern that other Lord Nelson owners may want to keep mind.
1) Aft Motor Mounts or what Cummins calls Accessory Supports failed on KEDGE and were replaced in 1989 at 985 Cummins engine hours. The original Supports failed at their "Fillet" welds. The replaced parts also had "Fillet" welds, so they were rewelded with "Through" welds at 1,165 Cummins engine hours. The Cummins Parts Catalog indicates that the original part number was replaced with a new number, so they may have discovered and corrected the problem at some point during their production. OUR VILLA had an Accessory Support failure that may or may not be related to the failure on KEDGE. The bolts securing the Accessory Support to the engine initially failed in 2003 on one side of the engine on OUR VILLA, and a second bolt failure occurred in 2008 on the opposite side.
2) The Cummins engine on KEDGE began experiencing over heating problems in 1997 at about 5,500 engine hours. We tried some standard corrections of replacing parts. That was unsuccessful. The next attempt was cleaning the engine heat exchanger with a cleaner obtained from an automotive parts store. That was also unsuccessful. We were boating in the Mobile, AL to New Orleans, LA area at that time and could not find a shop that acid boiled heat exchangers. Finally we replaced the heat exchanger at 5,548 engine hours with new part number 3910582. It is interesting that our Genny was experiencing the same problems simultaneously and was provided the same correction attempts as the main engine, so the Genny was also presented with a new heat exchanger. Why not go all the way- the Tranny oil cooler was also replaced.
3) The internal structure of the Cummins fiber glass Lift Muffler failed, and was replaced in 1999 at 5,928 engine hours. The Lift Muffler was replaced with a corrosion resistant part. Details are covered in Tuggers December 2000 Newsletter titled "Lift Muffler Replacement". A review of that article today revealed an error. The metal in the replacement part was not AISI 304 as written in the article, but was AISI 316 as specified on the weld drawing.
4) The entire Alternator was replaced in 2006 at 6,476 engine hours. Many Alternator internal parts were replaced through the years, but nothing would revive it that time.
This article does not provide details of similar problems on OUR VILLA. It does suggest however that perhaps there may be an LNVT weakness in those areas. The article also is not intended to suggest that the "four" failures were the only ones these two boats experienced. There were other failures.
Al Peterson, Kedge
27 March 2009