The Great Motor Oil Caper

Marsh Harbor
No LL

Once again I made a giant mistake resulting in an awful mess out in our cockpit. Messes are bad always but messes on board boats or airplanes are especially nasty to deal with.

This time, I screwed up trying to add motor oil to our Honda generator. It has the very annoying kind of filler hole. It sits at an angle and one should fill it until the oil starts spilling out the hole. Well, I thought to avoid mess I could tip the generator back until the filler hole was vertical. I did that, and started pouring in oil from a quart bottle.

It seemed to take more oil than I thought. I kept checking by letting the generator tilt back down to flat and seeing if oil ran out the hole. None did, so I added more. I checked again, none came out so I added still more. Finally, it appeared full but not until I had put a whole pint of oil in. That seemed like a lot. I shrugged my shoulders and pulled the start cord.

She started right up just fine, but three seconds later she started squirting out a huge cloud of blue smoke. I stopped the engine right away. Then, dirty black oil started seeping out from the engine in all directions. It came from the carburetor, and out the air filter, from the muffler, and from under the frame. It seemed to come from every orifice.

Yee God. I must have grossly overfilled the engine with oil. When it started, the sloshing oil must have been sucked up in to the cylinder, and back out through the oil valve, the exhaust valve, and backed up through the carburetor to the air filter.

I grabbed a rag and started trying to keep the mess from spreading, but it was soon overwhelmed. I scrambled inside the boat to grab an oil-absorbent cloth. When I came back, the puddle of oil had spread even more. Soon the absorbent cloth was saturated with dirty oil and I had to get another one. In the meantime the oil was covering the seats, leaking down into the lazarette storage and spreading second by second.

Well, to recover from this I had to remove and clean the spark plug, and the carburetor and the air filter. Then I put it all back together and pulled the start cord once again. I was worried that the engine might never run again until it was thoroughly cleaned. I was wrong, It started right away. Honda makes good engines. It was still making blue smoke as it burned the oil coating engine parts but it kept running. I left it running. After an hour the smoke stopped and everything is back to normal.

Ay ay ay. How stupid of me.