About a year ago the grit and crud in the sea round here wore grooves in the water pump shaft under the seal. Water started to drip out of the back of the pump through the hole provided for the purpose.

As I had some spare seals but no spare shaft (?76 from Yanmar) I decided to do a bad hack to stop the problem for a while .

I took some emery paper, put the shaft in the black and decker drill to use as a crude lathe and sanded the groove out of the shaft until it was invisible by slightly reducing the shaft diameter around the groove.

I have put the shaft back with new seals and so far I think I have done about another 50 hours without further leaks.

There is a company in wales which sells replacement shafts,bearings , seals gasket and cover plates for about the same price as the Yanmar shaft only.

I will go there on the next leak.

For some rather good repairs of pretty much any metal component you can try using epoxy-metal. Having seen demonstrations and from personal use, its a very handy item to keep in your boat box.
For the shaft, it bonds well and can be filed, sanded or cut on a lathe back to the desired diameter.

Couple of other ways of getting round scored seal landings on shafts.

One is to buy seals from seal supplier; eg Bearing Services, with same outer and inner diameter, but approx 5mm longer. This means the lip of the seal picks up a new portion of shaft.

Plan "B" is to fit a brass shim within the seal housing before fitting the seal. Effectively looks like a washer and will move the seal onto a new portion of shaft, avoiding the fretted area.

Final one is a tad more involved but best permanent fix; if you contact your local machine shop they can metal spray the shaft back and will grind the diamter back to size. If you are cute you can have them spray it in a harder material;eg Proxon, or somehting with a bit more chrome, and should outlast the original shaft.
If anyone intersested in this, give me a shout and I can arrange.
Costs are less than original volvo spare and will outlast original material

Thanks for the info and suggestions. I think it will not be too long before the water begins dripping again.

I once had a long discussion with a supplier of shaft sleeves the last time this happened and they kept saying ' we dont understand what you want : send us your shaft and we will fix it' and I kept saying 'no please send me the sleeves and the epoxy and I will fit it myself like in the PBO article, I have measured the shaft with a micrometer and this is its diameter +/-0.01 mm'

I wanted to keep sailing downtime to a minimum.

Unfortunately I threw away the previous shaft, so next time I will probably need to buy a new one and get the old one fixed . I suspect that soon will come a new water pump as the old one is extremely polished inside.

I finally wore out the spindle , ending up with a drip from the engine and a whole load of salty fur on the oil pipes.

Can you buy spindles :

Yes in Marine Power Bursledon, provided you help the old polish guy behind the counter by going round behind the counter and finding the boxes yourself.

No in Darthaven chandlery, or the chandlery in Weymouth, both of which had Yanmar displayed on their signs/


I will now report back sometime on re-plumbing the rusty oil pipes with copper tubing. It looks like modern Yanmars now have copper pipes for the oil feeds across the front of the engine where the salt water ends up.

Couple of other ways of getting round scored seal landings on shafts.

I will never understand all of the politics.