[C320-list] Shaft packing

[Fishbust]

Since the subject came up recently, I will ramble a bit here with my 2 cents. 

When I bought my boat, the standard packing was shot and leaking a lot, overdue for maintenance. Did some reading and steered away from graphite for fear of possible corrosion issues. 

I would suggest to anyone moving away from the old school wet flax packing to invest a couple dollars in a temp gun as the packing should never go above 30 degrees ambient temp if I recall properly. 

Going back and forth between the three choices, I finally decided on the white teflon ptfe flax packing, hand tight plus 1 flat. It doesn’t leak. Shaft spins freely. It actually bothered me that I couldn’t even make it leak backing it off. For the first month I was obsessed with checking on it and shooting it with a temp gun after every single run. Consistently the temp was within 20 degrees of ambient water temp, very important not to overheat it, so eventually I decided it was a good product and a job well done. We don’t miss that bilge pump waking us up at 2 am anymore! Lol.