New boat-questions abound. This one is about the tendency of inspection ports to bind up. A previous owner installed what look like perko clear inspection platse in the water tanks. Three in each tank. They provide great access-if you can get them off and back on again. They seem to bind up and wont go back on correctly-about half are permanently frozen on.I just replaced one with new, but noticed it tends to bind as well. Has anyone discoveered a solution? Maybe some kind of lubricant that wont taint my water tanks. Yestersday while topping off the starboard tank overfilled and started leaking copiously through one of the inspection port lids which I could not get seated due to friction of the lid.
Jim
Known problem. Pearson installed plastic, clear ports in the tanks and, when tanks filled, they leak past the oring and/or they leak past the mating surfaces of the flange and that tank. I think some folks have replaced with new, identical and had positive results and some have had negative results (still leaks).
Maybe someone who found a permanent solution will advise. For now, we can't fill all the way up.
http://www.pearson365.com/forum/index.php?topic=1408.0
I did manage to get ours to seal, but it was a struggle. We kept having trouble with the threads sticking, so the o ring wasn't making good contact all the way around. Vaseline helped that, but as dutchie mentioned, that may not be the best for the plastic, but it helped the sticking. The root cause was that the hole in the fiberglass was a little tight and not perfectly round. That flexed the ring causing the threads to bind. You could see the clearance between the clear plastic port and the ring change around the circumference. I think the same issue would happen if the fiberglass wasn't flat. It was tough finding a flat spot on the top of the fiberglass tank. I was prepared to lay extra plies on the tank to get a flat surface.