I am making progress - rebuilding our Volvo MD 11D engine (and doing it in the boat!)

The cold spell is over and I am back to work.  I was successful in removing the cylinder without any problems, except that I do not manage to push out the liner from the cylinder.  It is stuck!  The manual is saying something along the lines:  "tap lightly and push down with your hands ...".  A NO go!  And I tried quite a bit more than that!  I will have to have it pressed out in the shop.

I then tried to remove the piston pins.  I really did not want to go into the scenario where I had to remove the connecting rods and the big end bearing cups - and then reinstalling all of that.  Manfred's article suggested that I can remove the pistons without that.

The only problem was that the piston pins did not want to be removed!!!

A day later, and equipped with a heat gun, some aluminum piping and a large clamp, I tried again.  If you have three (!!!!) hands, YES,  this system will work great.  If you have only two .... ?  But with some contortions, I managed, eventually, and the pistons are home.

But the pistons show that they have been in service for a while.  The major issue - I think -  is that the top ring has a ring clearance exceeding Volvo's specifications (we have 0.25mm, compared to 0.10mm as per handbook).  In contrast, all the other rings appear to meet specifications.

I called French Creek Marine and asked Wilburt to put aside 2 pistons and liners for me.  It looks like we are going to have a brand new Volvo MD 11D in our boat, coming spring!

The main reason I removed the cylinders (and liners) was to access the water cooling passages of the cylinder behind the liner wall.  Manfred's symptoms regarding engine overheating issues were very similar to ours, and I suspected that, despite our acid treatment in Martinique, the procedure was not enough to clean thouroughly these passages.  Indeed, when you look at these small holes around the liner (you may not see the built up of stuff around the hole, but some of them are significantly smaller) you wonder why anyone did not have cooling problems earlier.  And I recall a diesel mechanic mentioning that these holes were a problem with these engines.  Now I understand!

If we had NOT removed the cylinder, and had just worked on decarbonizing the engine (i.e. valves), we would not have found out about the aging piston rings etc.  I am happy (?) we did!

Now everything is stripped down enough so that I can consider getting things back together.

More about this in the future.