This morning is blustery and cold, so it's a good day for "inside" work. This morning's project is to repack the stuffing box. This needs to be done occasionally, when the adjustment nut seems to have more resistance than normal when tightening to control the water ingress. (If you're not familiar with what a stuffing box does, think of the drive shaft going through the hull of the boat to the propeller. The hole around the shaft needs to be filled with something soft to allow the shaft to turn without too much friction, and allow some water to come in for cooling and lubrication of the shaft. The stuffing box nut allows you to control the amount of water by compressing the stuffing around the shaft.) Above are the tools I needed to do the job: a knife to cut the new stuffing to size, a corkscrew pick to get the old stuffing out, a wrench to turn the nut on the stuffing box, and a hammer to just tap the locking nut to keep the nut from turning after it's adjusted. The piece of PVC pipe is used to help push the stuffing into the stuffing nut around the shaft.
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