At home, almost the only nod to boat season preparation open to me has been tinkering with this new (old) gearbox.

In this mini adventure I partook of the joys of Rust, Fertan and Engine Enamel.

In my previous post I’d given the insides of the new gearbox a thorough look, poked about inside to make myself feel good that the mechanism was running well and would not be worse than our old gears.

I then turned my full attention to the outside, cosmetically it looked kind of nasty, dull red paint and quite a pitted rusty underside that hardly shifted with my mains powered drill and a steel cup brush.

All the loose rust taken off and looking a little better I cleaned up and painted the shift control with some nice green engine paint (not the colour I wanted but it looks good.

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I set aside the project for a few days and left it at the back of our dining room under a box. But within a day or two I had small blooms of rusty droplets on the surface. The cold from our patio doors was accelerating condensation in the mornings and giving us surprising orange blobs on some of the surface that I’d brushed.

I’d heard about this seemingly magic “Fertan” stuff that fellow westerly owners have been treating keel rust with, and after a quick ask on the WoA forums I splashed out on a small bottle for this job.

Fertan is dark brown, kind of like slightly thick soy sauce. When it contacts rust it “converts” it into a more stable surface that by itself is resistant to further rusting for it says six months. You are supposed to wipe it down to take off any black dust and paint with a metal paint after a day when the fertan has finished it’s job. what you see in the photo above is right after application. The job did not take long.

With the fertan all dry, brushed off it was a quick 30 minute paint once the kids were in bed. This engine enamel stuff is quite pungent so I actually left the gearbox outside in the garden to dry overnight (under a waterproof cover) with no ill effects.

More jobs are still TODO but I am growning more confident now, perhaps I could fit the gearbox myself. I should probably do the shaft seal at the same time too.