changing zinc's on a B3 Seacore system

[seapuppy]

well..today was the day I was going to change my zinc's on my Bravo 3 drives..since I have two....everything I'm telling you is x2...
I have the horseshoe shaped zinc's on the fwd end of the cavitation plates....I forgot I had them....the ram's are a royal pain in the butt.....I snapped 2 heads off the bolts....(this gets interesting as the story goes on).....

at this point I'd like to thank Jim Nihm for coming to my aide and helping wack the crap out of the zinc's....

now...I've done my zinc's on my old b3 drive...and it was fairly easy...this was a friggin nightmare....

on the cavitation plate there are 2 zinc's...one bolts from the top...one bolts from the bottom....and of course they are frozen solid to the drive....I used a screwdriver.....prybar....you name it....this sucker wouldn't budge....so...called my favorite mechanic to get the trick to get the zinc's off....(now I owe him a beer)....stuck a screwdrive in a small hole on top of the drive and the zinc popped off....(crap..too easy)...

so...by now I'm pretty poopped from getting up and down..beating and hammering...plus I had to get the propper zinc's for my drives which I didn't have....well...finally got them and tried to find 4 simple little screws from my zinc's on the rams that snapped off...would you believe after going to 3 different marine shops...I finally scored 4 of them......
I have to go back to the boat to finish installing all of new zinc's on and screws....

then I can toss it in the water for the first time for recommissioning and run down the river......

again...thanks jim...greatly appreciated the help..

SP

[shrew]

SP, did the bolts for the zincs on the rams snap off? IF so, he did you get the snapped bolts off? The reason I ask is I snapped a bolt for the ram zinc on the STBD ram and cannot get that thing out for the life of me. Seems like a silly reason to replace the ram, but I notice that I get very little reduction in zinc size on that ram when I install with only 1 bolt holding it on. this tells me that I I am not geting solid contact and therefore the anode is not sacrificing properly.

[seapuppy]

man..sorry I hadn't seen this one shrew....today was IN.....SANE!!!.....to make a long story short....I snapped the bolt head off...so...to me it was simple as extend the rams and get your fingers on the shaft and slowly twist it out....I really had to get the old zinc off by using a set of plyers......once you get the zinc off..then you can get some angled needle nose plyers onto it......it also helps to take the ram bolt off some so you can move the ram out away from the drive...

however if you snapped it off at the base of the ram mount...then bout the only thing you can do is pull the ram off and drill a small hole down the shaft and use an easy out....


SP

[shrew]

Yes, the zinc bolt snapped inside of the ram, I've tried to drill it, but there's not a lot of room to get a drill in there. The chuck hits the ram's piston and I can only drill at an angle for a limited depth before I'm afraid I'm going to drill into the female threads. I wish this was as simple as removing the zinc and using a pair of vise grips, but no such luck. this ocurred last spring, so now I'm trying to recall if I extended the ram before I drilled. That would have been a stupid oversight on my part. i'll give it another go.

Thanks SP.