Trayson's 2008 XLV ballast system upgrade

[trayson]

Well, we dug into the ballast upgrade this weekend and I can now see why there's all the talk about reversible systems being easier than aerators.

I decided to forego using the OEM scupper intake for my new aerator pumps and went with 3 dedicated 1" thru-hulls for each of my new pumps. I am capping the OEM scupper intake and will reserve that for down the road when I will likely add a 4th pump that's a reversible to use for filling misc bags...

Trying to remove the scupper or trying to grind off the scupper fins was too much work. so I didn't go that route.

So I had to fit a thru hull, ball valve, and the pump itself for each of the 3 new pumps. Everything seemed pretty straightforward until I realized that not only did the stack of components need to fit in the bilge but I also needed clearance for the lever on the ball valves to be able to work AND I also needed to be able to spin on the pump without the output port hitting anything as I spun it on.

I ended up having to get pretty creative. One intake goes straight up. Another has an elbow and the pump is mounted horizontal. The last one ended up mounted at a 45 degree angle after the thru-hull. But I think it's going to work okay. Another thing we did was cut off a couple inches of the handles of the ball valves. That way we could mount the valves with the handles pointing either towards or away from the pump. it also gave us the flexibility to mount the valves so the handles rotated down to the floor if needed. We just took the cutoff wheel to the handles and it's amazing how much flexibility is added when those handles are trimmed down to size.

Here you can see a pic of the starboard side of the bilge. the empty ball valve is the factory ballast scupper that I won't be using at this time. The horizontal pump has the output cocked to about 1 or 2 o'clock because that's how we had to orient it to clear the vdrive.


This is the starboard side. It seemed to fit best a little behind the fresh water intake for the engine with a 45 degree elbow between the thru-hull and the ball valve. My Flush Pro takes up a lot of the space forward of the fresh water intake.





An attempt at a view of it all: