2008 196 stuffing box alignment

[cam]

When my club got our three year old 196 a couple of weeks ago we were given a wrap of square profile 5mm (slightly larger than 3/16") gland packing to put in the drive shaft stuffing box, I fitted the packing before we put the boat in the water and then adjusted to a small drip when in the water.
After about an hours running I found that the packing had burned out, we bought a length of 5mm packing and I cut and fitted 4 wraps and put it back in the water, we found that to get a reasonable drip rate the gland would heat up to a point where we could barely touch it but would cool down OK if we had an unacceptable drip rate (only tightening the gland nut by hand)

When I fitted the packing the 1st time I noticed that the gland nut was hard to get the threads started as it was at a slight angle to the shaft, I slackened off the stern tube rubber and managed to get the nut on but there wasn't enough play in it to get an even gap all round between the nut and the shafts.

My 2 questions are, should I be able to adjust the nut to shaft gap? and if I cant and a slight missalignment is acceptable should I try 6mm (1/4") packing?

Thanks
Cam

[DanielC]

One option, change to one of the newer drip-less packing assemblies.
I did that on my boat. If i recall before I did that, the packing nut assembly was just held by a stiff rubber hose.
Could it be the ends of this hose are not square, and that is causing the packing nut to be misaligned?
It is also possible the propeller shaft strut was replaced on your boat, and was not aligned to the center of the propeller shaft port in the hull, and then the engine was aligned to that, so not both the propeller shaft, and engine are in alignment to each other, but not aligned to the hull.