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Johnson Evinrude Gearcase Bearing Installation

In this video I install the Johnson 30HP gearbox bearings. This involves installing the race for the forward propeller shaft bearing and pressing in the pinion gear bearings and drive shaft bearing. I also press new prop shaft bearings into the bearing carrier.

Johnson Evinrude Gearcase Bearing Installation – Video Transcript

Johnson Evinrude Gearcase Bearing Installation

Hey there, Dangar Stu here. Today's video is about putting the gearbox for our Johnson 30 back together and is proudly sponsored by MarineEngine.com.

Before we get going with that though I've got another viewer t-shirt photo. This one here is David Nuland from Belgium, I hope I got your surname right David but thanks for sending the photo in, unlucky lose to France but looking forward to the game this weekend. Alright one more spot than we've done the full loop. I also often forget to mention that the link to buy t-shirts is in the description of each video if you want one.

This video has been a long time coming because I've been struggling to find the information and the tools I need more than the parts. MarineEngine.com were able to supply the parts easy enough but the tools were totally a different story. A big thanks to Craig from Hewitt's Marine down the road who lent me some of the tools I'm going to need, unfortunately they didn't have the spacers I need to set the bearings for the pinion to the correct depth and it turns out they're actually discontinued from Evinrude so you can't get them at all anyway.

The information on the depth isn't available as far as I can see, it's certainly not the service manual, it just says use this part number spacer to get the depth, you can't get it and it doesn't tell you the depth so we're gonna figure something else out. Fortunately though I do stock a universal tool it'll definitely help solve this problem out. With the power of beer we will be victorious. My plan is to start by putting the forward prop shaft bearing in, then we can put the forward gear in, and then we can put the pinion gear in and I'm gonna measure from the top, how far it is from the top of the gearbox to the top of the pinion here. Then you can see here there's these witness marks on the pinion of where the bearings have been rolling previously and with a bit of math we should better figure out the distance we need. It may not be millimeter perfect but I don't see what else we can do.

Undoubtedly we could take the part Number, put on the net, ask someone who's got one to measure it, make one pretty easily out of a piece of pipe but I just don't have time. All right let's start with the race for the prop shaft bearing. Here's the new forward prop shaft bearing, so I'm just going to quickly double check it's right. Just comparing the two races or the cups, and they seem fine. What I'm gonna use to do that is one of these kits for driving races in, fortunately these are one of these really generic tools you don't need one of these custom outboard tools, looks like the 40 millimeter one is gonna fit this race, I think the next one is 44 which is too big.

The service manual says to oil this first so we'll oil it, it sits in a bath, things like wheel bearings we tend not to because they're just packed with grease but in this case it's sits immersed in oil anyway and it's only gonna make it easier to get in, this is also being in the freezer from the wall just to shrink it down to make a bit easier to install. All right there it is down there just resting where it needs to go, I've got the gearbox sitting here on a block of wood so as I hammer it down it won't sort of, damage it too much. The handle on this tool is not long enough to reach out of the gearbox, I'm actually it's going to give it a few taps with the handle of the hammer, just see if I can get it started so it stays in position first.[Music] Alright that got to started so it's not falling out, now I'm just gonna find an extension rod that I can put on the end of the tool and just drive it all the way home. I realized towards the end actually because this driveshafts slightly tapered, you can sit it on a tool and it sits quite nicely so it worked alright in the end. Now we've got our bearing race down in there and it's seated flush and it's all the way in you can hear it sort of change tone slightly when it's all the way down and the edges are even all the way around as well.

So a tool like this is pretty important because it's very hard to get on to that with anything else and if you damage the inside surface, this is the old race here, if you're sort of trying to tap the edge and you scrape down by mistake then you've really got to replace it because that little nick will wear the bearing very fast.I think this whole set cost about $40, they're not that expensive. All right now interestingly it says in the service manual now, we're doing with this step first so we can take this measurement but the order it says to install the components is that we put the pinion gear in first then we put the forward gear in afterwards so we need our bearing in, into that race, so this is our bearing here, tapered roller bearing.

So we're going to put that into the race, then I'm going to put the pinion gear in and then we're gonna try and slot the forward gear to see how that goes, then when they're all seated we'll take our measurements. So I think I'll drop the bearing in first, just leave that in, we're gonna oil that properly before we install it for the final time. Then we'll just slot our pinion gear assembly in. This is our forward gear so I'm just gonna put it in, went in nice and easily. This is the reverse gear but all I did with the forward gear was drop it down past the pinion gear, come round and then it dropped into the bearing. So that's what it looks like now, pinion gear sitting in there and resting against the forward gear. What I want to do now is measure from the top of the pinion gear to the top of the housing here.

When we use our installing tool, which I think you could make too so I'll tell you some measurements where I can, is we have a little plate like this, they call it a plate but it's like a little disc and it rests this way on top of here, on top of this housing. So what I'm gonna do is measure from the top of the pinion gear to the top of the housing here. So I'm just gonna reach in with my finger and make sure the pinion gear is seated up against the top of the gear box and then we'll see how far it is. I'm going to call that 126 millimeters, all right we'll take that pinion gear out now and we'll figure out how far down we need to push each of the bearings. So what I now know is we need 126 millimeters from here back so we need the top of this one here, this bearing here, to be 126 millimeters plus the distance of that dark section and the bottom bearing here we need to be a 126 millimeters plus the distance from here to the start of the light section here, that's what I'm gonna go with. So it's six millimeters long here, so I'm gonna say 132 millimeters from the top of the gearbox housing to the top of the top bearing and then here, looks like it's 36 millimeters so I'm going to call it 162 millimeters from the top of the gearbox to the top of the bottom bearing. All right I'll grab the bearings out of the freezer now and I'll show you how this tool works.

So this is the bearings I'm using, we got four of these all up, so these are the two for the pinion. Because I want oil in the rollers and a bit of oil is gonna make them go in more easily I'm also going to just roll these in oil a little bit first. Alright so while they're sitting there, the weight is tool works is you find a cup that fits if we find an old bearing, here's an old one, this is the cup that fits here so it drives the bearing in without damaging it, this cups ever so slightly smaller than the outside so it doesn't catch on the inner tube at all. Then the idea is you put a plate on here, you put a spacer on here, then we put a screw on the end here then you hammer it down and this distance here is the exact distance you need.

So what we need to do is make up a spacer here that gives us the two totals we need, which is 132 millimeters and 162 millimeters. Just doing a little sanity check, on the measurements, so there is exactly 30 mils between the tops of the two bearings so just a double, little double-check to make sure our measurements make sense, and they do. So I got the bearing here, so if I put an old bearing on the top of the bearing is obviously level with the underside of this tool, the lip here, and even if I sort of roughly pop it on like this we can see that this spacer is about 10 millimeters too short because we're here at 172 millimeters and we need to be down here at 162 so what I think I'll do is just get some washers and pack this out so we get the right depth. So that's a 11.8, 9.4. All right let's see what the total is anyway. So I put a writing across the face of tool and then we measure down here, we're pretty much dead on 162 milliliters now, so this is what I'm going to go with. So once again it says make no dry assemblies, lubricate everything with gear box oil which is what we're doing.

All right, it recommends using a press I think if you don't have access to a press you could probably just hammer them in, but we'll use a press. Before we head over there I'll just show you one last thing and this is from our newly oiled bearings, is they have two sides. One side has the lettering on it, the other side doesn't and the side that doesn't is slightly tapered so this is the side we're gonna push down, we're pushing down on the curb side so it goes in and we're pressing on to the side that has the part number writing on it. So, the side with the writing here is the side we're pressing against the tool. Alright, pop the gearbox in the press so that the rams above where we needed to be, then I'm gonna put the bearing onto the tool, writing side towards the tool, and then we'll drop it down in.

What you can see now is this distance until this washer here touches these washers, that's the exact distance we now need to press this bearing in. All right, I've reached the limit of the travel of this ram before we've got it all the way so that's okay I'll just, twist it up. Alright. So as soon as this top washer touches our spacer here, we know we're at the right depth. Now we need to get the distance down to 132 millimeters because we're shrinking this distance we need a larger spacer here. This bit of pipe fits over so I'm actually just going to measure the right distance, maybe tiny bit less so we can put a washer in just to get it right. All right putting the calipers across this now, it's saying not over ninety-four, ninety-four and a half millimeters so a might grind a smidge off. What I will do, a little standard check, I'll just measure this distance again to make sure we're close to the 132 we were hoping for.

Yup pretty much being 132 so this should be good, alright. Writing side against the tool, will go press this in. So those three, the two pinion bearings and the forward prop shaft bearing race I think are by far the three hardest parts so they're done, I can't vouch for these measurements they're my best guess, they haven't been proven to be correct yet, if somebody has the actual tool, the actual spacer I'll be interested to hear what their lengths are, if they're way out from this I'll just have to redo it but hopefully you get the idea of how they should be installed and if you can I'd get access to the right tool because pretty hard without it. Okay I've just popped the pinion gear back in too so I'll show you what it looks like now. So hopefully you can see there, we've now got the bearings in and you can just see the top of the pinion shaft poking up through the bearings, so it looks well supported.

Even if they're not millimeter perfect I reckon they'd be good enough to do the job. We can also see here that only about this much of the pinion gear is supposed to pop up from that top bearing, so I eyeball it, it actually looks like it's running in a pretty good position. Okay next thing we're to install is the drive shaft bearing which goes in a housing above the two pinion gear bearings. This is the drive shaft bearing we'll be installing. This is the bearing housing so we need to put the bearing into the housing first then the housing into the gearbox. Once again I'm just gonna oil this first, I'm going to use this little attachment which came in the Evinrude kit but essentially it's this shape. If you want to make a tool like this all you really need to do is find a bit of solid round bar that's slightly smaller than the outside diameter of the bearing and then machine the end down so that it's slightly smaller than the inside diameter, so not hard to make if you can go to a machinist they'll be able make one up for you.

All right once again writing side towards the tool, so the slightly cupped side can come in. Although it did the job, I'm thinking this may not be the right tool for this job in that what I believe the tool should be like is small enough to go through the bearing but large enough to actually press against housing, this means that the bearing will stop when it's flush and it also means the same tool can be used to push the housing itself in. What I'm going to do in this case is, I've got a larger one which is slightly smaller than the housing so I'm going to use that to push the housing in. In this case also the housing pushes in until it hits a lip so you don't have to measure the depth in any way so this should be well straightforward.

Alright housing and bearing in with the writing side of the bearing pointing up and I'll just put a little extension on this. I can feel there, that gearbox is starting to lift as it comes to a stop, so you know it's all the way in. Alright, now you can see the housing and the drive shaft bearing there and the two oil seals go on top of that. Alright, the last two bearings we have now are the two prop shaft bearings that go into the bearing carrier so we need to press the two in. one each end, pretty straightforward. These two bearings are the same part number and obviously diameter then as the pinion gear bearings. Alright, we've got the tool, got the two oiled bearings, got the housing, will head on at the press and get these last two done.

Okay so that's in with the room still free for the oil seals and then the inner one goes in here. What we have now is the aft bearing here with space for those oil seals and the forward one here, so these are the two that the prop shaft runs on, then finally goes into that tapered roller bearing right at the front of gearbox, so ultimately the prop shaft runs on three bearings. Okay I think we're gonna wrap up here because I have run out of time and I think it makes sense to have these videos divided if you're searching for them down the track, so next time we'll put everything back together so I'll put all that shift linkage and all that kind of stuff which I know a lot of people have problems with it's a bit tricky, then we'll put all the seals in and then we'll put the new water pump on. So until then take care I'll catch you soon bye.