So a while back Candy Cane’s Atomic 4 started belching oil-burning smoke, and eventually failed to start. Given the timeline of that failure, it’s a pretty safe bet that the piston rings and the cylinder wall were no longer properly isolating the cylinder from the crankcase, and that the scope of work involved in fixing it would be close enough to a rebuild (also there were enough leaks, loose-fitting couplings, etc.) that it may as well get rebuilt.
I figured that for the cost to order all the parts I’d need for a rebuild, I could probably just get a Moyer rebuild and save myself a lot of time, but that was pretty expensive, and I’d had a hankering to repower to electric for over a decade. As luck would have it, I was soon to learn that I could probably get an Electric Yacht motor for about the cost of a Moyer rebuild — but I could also possibly put something together myself for a few thousand less (assuming that my time is worth nothing — more more accurately, that I’d enjoy the work enough for its value not to be an issue). On top of all this, I’d had an opportunity to take a look at an Electric Yacht motor, and found it to be a remarkably simple piece of machinery: just an electric motor driving a shaft via a belt.
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