More questions!

A) With regards to where/how the cooling water blankets the engine - As part of our winterization we took off the thermostat housing and replaced the thermostat. During that process you get to see exactly how the water gets channeled to/from the four different hoses that are attached. So you have cold water coming from the impeller, going through tranny cooler tube, into thermostat housing. Then you have the J tube curving down from thermostat housing and going into the aft-center of the engine. This line is constantly getting water as the thermostat housing just has a flow-through section that allows water to pass through here all the time. In addition, you have two hoses on the top of the thermostat that run to the exhaust headers, again this is flow-through and will always be open. Finally, you have the hole underneath the thermostat itself which becomes a viable path for the water when the thermostat opens as it gets to around 160-180 degree F.

What I don’t understand is the difference of function between the water going into the engine via J tube vs. the water going in under the thermostat. Are they both doing separate sections of motor cooling of the motor jacket? Do they come together at some point inside the engine block? Now that I’ve had the thermostat housing off and in my hand, I’m trying to build a picture of where the water’s flowing in each scenario.

B) So a while back I said that I put my finger into the bottom end of the tranny cooler tube and felt like a fabric/fibrous “something”. We got some picking tools and scraped out and salad’s worth of seaweed/leaves/gunk that had been in there blocking it up. (Upto this point we had no inline strainer and this is our first year on a weedy lake.) My question is whether folks think it would be worthwhile to take the Vdrive rectangular housing off and make sure there’s no vegetation/blockage in there also? Has anyone done it? Is it just a matter of unbolting? Is there a rubber ring or a gasket you’d need to replace? We had no problems getting water or AF through the system during winterization but the blockage in the tranny cooler tube has me wondering about the Vdrive. (We’ll do the raw water impeller in the spring.)


C) Dryair / Dryeze (condensation crystals) – has anyone used a product like this in their boat for outdoor winter storage? Any comment on whether it’s useful?