Installing the Yanmar

The engine was ready for launch. Unfortunately the tiller head was not, due to a broken laser cutter.  We have to leave the boat on the hard while we go home for Christmas.  Time ran out, and all the little things added up.  We're still packing!  And honestly a little burnt out. It will be nice to not think about the boat, or breath fumes, or bathe in mineral spirits, or come home with fiberglass rashes.  We'll be clean for 2 weeks!  

I installed the engine controls in the port side cockpit seat locker. The original engine controls were old levers attached to linkages made up of 1" solid steel rods (no joke) that ran through the engine bay to the shifter and throttle.   Since I'm not a neanderthal in need of spare club material, we will use push-pull cables like normal people.  This engine control set up probably saved the boat 75 pounds of steel rods and levers.  We decided on Vetus' dual control lever.  The single lever control both shift and throttle functions with neutral at top center, then it clicks either forward or backwards into gear before sliding smoothly to control throttle.  A neat little built in linkage system, so you can't accidentally shift while at full throttle.  Also, I remember watching my friend hold to in mixed winds and current while waiting for a bridge, and he was constantly bumping the shifter back and forth while matching the throttle each time.  I thought about how easy it would have been at that point to have it all on one lever so you can't make a mistake.  The lever also has a button to temporarily disconnect the shift cable so you can apply throttle in neutral for warm up purposes.

      Shifter and control panel                                            Back of control panel

It took a while to finally figure out how to mount the fuel tank.  I had removed the old rusting steel fuel tanks months ago in preparation for this tank, but have been unsuccessful at devising a mounting solution I felt comfortable with.  I wanted to do it without drilling through the deck, but I couldn't devise a way to mount it and feel confident without hanging it from through-bolts to the deck, so I sucked it up, picked an area near the toe rails so you wouldn't notice the bolts and so it wouldn't have any core material (the deck becomes solid fiberglass near the edges), and drilled.  The fuel tank is now SOLID in situ and fully plumbed, including the deck fill.  It has 1/4" rubber pads at all contact points, nylon straps holding it hard against those points, and stainless straps supporting the weight (over 200 pounds full!) to the deck, both the nylon and the stainless straps are separately adjustable in tension with nuts on 1/4" threaded rod.  It sits nicely up under the deck to the point that it is barely visible or noticeable inside the huge cockpit lockers.  The other side is a mirror of this one, so anytime I want to include another tank on the other side, I know what I need and how to do it.

Prepping 25 gallon fuel tank

Fuel tank installed with new vent and deck fill.

The engine is fully plumbed and wired with safety clips on everything, and anti-abrasion pads where needed.

We test ran it last Sunday. We had the water intake run to a bucket, and it sucked about 4 gallons out of the 5 gallon bucket on the first run.  It runs perfectly!
We video taped the first test run, if it doesn't show up below it's on our Facebook wall.

Success!

Tropical Storms and Tornado Watches

Tropical Storm Debby keeps dancing around us. It's been dark and cloudy for the past couple days with rain all around us on the radar, but never a drop until nightfall. It's been nice working under cloud cover.
Today there is 100% chance of rain, and a Torndado Watch.
I went to the boat this morning to inspect after last nights rain, hammered and banged on some stuff, then sealed it up tight for the coming storm.
And here we are at noon, the X in the tiny spec of rain-less gray.

Somehow it keeps missing us.
This week the cutlass bearing housing and packing gland were re-installed, and the engine was finally aligned and removed from the boat. Hallelujah we can finally get down to business.
Here is the stern tube exit, stripped of 5200, epoxy, and barrier coat.  It's ready for the cutlass bearing to be re-installed.

Dry fit:

Old packing gland and shaft

Old gland removed. 5200 does not come off easily.
Cleaned and prepped and Dry fit:

The packing gland is installed. The engine was aligned and removed.

Now we can prep to install the cockpit hatch!  First the leaky rotting drains had to be removed.  They did not come out easily.  The nuts were so rusted they had to be broken off.

The cockpit floor is 1/4 inch fiberglass with a wood core, and a thin layer of fiberglass beneath.
The fiberglass on the bottom is delaminated from the wood core and pops right off. It will be re-glassed with the new hatch lip.  Whether or not we re-core has yet to be decided.

Here is the core from the other side. AJ removed the cross board beneath it.

The engine room is getting a makeover.  Boards and panel walls are getting knocked out of their delaminated fiberglass tabbing.  We will add new walls separating the cockpit seat lockers and engine bay.

We're removing the teak from the cockpit floor.  I started drilling the teak plugs only to find there were no screws beneath them. So I started with the hammer and chisel.

In this area, the fiberglass was not fully saturated with resin when it was first built 43 years ago. The paint is stuck to dry feathery fiberglass.  The screw holes are still there, unfilled.
We got caught in a quick rain storm early in the week, and got to inspect the cabin for leaking after having patched the holes from the trim screws.  Water still comes in above this window.  We wonder if it is leaking through the hand rail and draining down through the core of the cabin top to this spot.  Further examination will tell..

Filthy Filthy Work

We spent the first week on the hard breaking into all the projects and finding out what we were really in for. We also got the eager advice of nearly everyone in the yard. The guys who run it are helpful, and the older men working on their boats are happy to lend a hand to "young people with a plan." Most of them are Vietnam Vets and I'm pretty sure none of them have ever seen a woman in the boat yard. I arrive at 6 before they do and leave well after they've gone home. I don't think they know what to think of me, and certainly don't know what to say to me. It's pretty amusing.

The first order of business was to figure out if we could strip the bottom paint ourselves. In some places it just flaked off to the barrier coat. But not in enough places. AJ tested a paint stripper, but it's too many layers of old paint to do any real damage. So AJ took to the grinder. First you have to tent the area to prevent the dust from hitting other boats.

This is AJ and a friend after grinding two square feet of the bottom paint. I don't know what kind of suits those are but there was more dust on the boys than on the suits. It ran out of their hair for days.

So when we calculated the time, daily suits, masks, and buying ACE out of grinding and sanding pads it's an even exchange if not cheaper to hire it out to the redneck in the yard with a team of Mexicans that have the equipment ready and the means to clean up the disaster zone. And they can do it in a few days, as opposed to a few weeks. They are going to be grinding and repainting the bottom starting Monday.

The next order of duty was emptying the bilge of oil/diesel/water. We couldn't dump it into the river, so we had to haul out with it. We pulled out the oil absorbers then vacuumed out 30 gallons of water 5 gallons at a time. There is nothing like the smell of old soaking oil/diesel/water sludge to remind you of what it's made of. Dead animals. And that's exactly what it smells like. Like a sewer flooded a mechanics shop. After vacuuming what we could, it was time to play "How many tools can you find in the bilge muck?"

About 15.

The crazy thing was that 30 gallons of bilge water is still so far down the bilge looks almost empty. It has to hold 150 gallons of water. We feel that's excessive and are considering what to fill the bottom with to make it shallower. We may drop lead in the keel to add weight aft. The new engine is half the weight of the old one and we are bow heavy right now with the anchors and anchor chain up front. We have pulled so much crap off the boat that we will likely be sitting even higher on the waterline than before, so we may need the extra weight.

Monday Mack Sails came to remove the mast.

Then AJ stripped it of hardware and rigging, then hacked it up for scrap.

The ends are tapped up because it was full of standard packing popcorn foam.
A few days after removing the mast, the cabin had decompressed itself and gotten a touch narrower. You could see the shifts in the trim along the ceiling. Then the mast support blocks slid right out. They are cedar, not teak. Raw, untreated cedar, soft and splitting. No sealer, no glue, no epoxy, not even paint. Nothing but raw blocks shoved under the support wall in standing water. WTF??!! People be crazy.

I spent my first couple days tackling the newly emptied cockpit lockers. AJ took out the wood sidewalls so it's open to drain into the engine compartment and bilge. So after the toxic bilge water was emptied and disposed of, I filled it with soapy dirty water. More dirty than soapy. I spent two days in there scrubbing and chipping paint. It's stifling; you're in there with open pores, cleaning chemicals, fiberglass splinters, wood splinters and layers of dirt. In the early days of fiberglass construction the threads of glass used were much thicker than today. AJ found a glass splinter buried in his leg after a week of irritation - that kind of bigger. It's rough and looks like dried snot on the interior hull, making it hard to get a really good sanding.

The block on the floor in the left locker is the steering sheave block.

AJ cut both of them out. They turned out to be solid teak cubes sheathed in fiberglass. Someone cared more about the turning blocks than the mast support...

Next we need to finish the engine room so the engine can finally be installed. Cleaning it for paint has been a year long process so far. It used to be covered in muck like we dug out of the bilge. But even still, it's far from paint-able. There are chemical products guaranteed to cause cancer and birth defects that will strip the surface like satan's piss. Barely even have to wipe it down after. They run about $20 a bottle, and I believe are the usual course of action. Though we may let the guys doing the bottom job finish up the engine room. We've both spent months in there with toxins already. We'll see.

This week I also started cleaning the interior compartments/inside hull bottom. Some previous owner not only painted over dirt here too, but dripped varnish and epoxy everywhere. Quarter inch thick globs in some places.

I can't imagine clean glossy wipe-able storage compartments. It will be a different life.

While Doing this I got to see where every compartment drains to. Icky as it is, I would not be comfortable not having laid hands on and tended to every nook and cranny of the boat. At the end of this there shouldn't be anything we don't know about it.

Here's more dirty dirty hull. My camera likes to make whites white, even when they're not. This compartment is behind your feet on the starboard settee. About 4 feet deep with an 8" tall entrance.

Here's the wiring cabinet. The ceiling in there is pretty much what they all look like. Once the decks are stripped of hardware and the blocks and bolts come out they'll get fully redone.

Here's one of the chain plates from the inside.

The plywood panel trim broke off with the slightest tug. You can see the light coming through the fiberglass.

The engine got lifted in for engine mount and shaft fitting.

It's so awesomely small. You could not reach your arm around the old Merecedes. And you had to suspend yourself upside down from the boom to access any part of the back. Now you can sit behind it.

This weekend we are stripped the boat of plumbing, the remainder of the wiring, and the always present superfluous crap. So starting Monday I will have empty, hose-free, wire-free compartments and subfloors to clean, sand, and eventually paint with gray bilge coat. I'm hoping to be able to lightly hose out the compartments for the final wash and watch it all drain.
Here are the subfloors. With four gummy filthy filthy useless hoses. The lids on the right are the top of the water tank that was fiberglassed over the bilge. The subfloor would curve down and run into the bilge otherwise.

like this

The vertical wall at the bottom of the photo is the separation between the water tank and the bilge. Without the tank, water would run down the sides of the subfloors and into the bilge below - the full length of the keel. Instead water sits on the level subfloor, soaking the keel bolts. All those hoses were meant to drain everything into the bilge, but they did not. Water just became blocked around and under them.

The two metal poles of death are the mounts for the table. The 40 lb Mahogany plywood table that's not going back in. It's slants down buckling under it's own weight and there's no knee clearance. It's hard to work around those poles, and hard not to gash your leg open on them. They need to be removed to lift the floor boards there. They are bolted through to an inaccessible extra block of wood underneath. They will probably have to be ground off.
Cutting out those hoses.

What's under the fibgerglass tape that's peeling? dirt. But look! A floor! A floor that won't have any hoses running there when we've re-plumbed. Just a cleanable open subfloor. yeah yeah.

That about wraps up week one. It rained part of the day 3 days this week. Back to tarping the engine and cockpit before we leave. The rest of the time it's hot and sunny. There was a spectacular lightening show a few nights ago. Draco, Ursa Minor, and Cepheus are in the sky. Nothing makes me more determined to sail the ocean or more motivated to keep working than seeing the night sky.

Work Work Work

AJ got back from the yacht delivery October 23^rd. We then cleaned the engine and engine room.  I sat squashed behind the engine with cans of degreaser and scrubbed away at the engine for a week. It had so much build up that I felt like I was rescuplting it, finding all of it's dips and channels and carving them back out. I went through 3 cans of degreaser, a box of que tips (only thing small enough to clean out all the grooves), about 12 rolls of shop towels, and numerous brushes. At then end of the day I was covered head to toe in grease. The clean engine with the greasy tarp finally removed from beneath it: No more grease feet!

The engine room was a hell hole of awkward balancing and reaching. Covered in years of sludge build up. We shoveled and scraped and scrubbed it until we could see the fiberglass.

   

AJ had to order fuel injector pipes and gaskets and random small bits from Brittan. There is one guy in the world selling parts for this engine and he is in England. While we waited on those AJ continued to get parts tested and sandblasted. Aside from cleaning the engine there was also tons of parts to clean and derust sitting in the cockpit. I wire brushed rust off iron and oxidation off aluminum. Metal on metal scraping is not as horrific as nails on a chalk board, but it is in the same family. I don't care for it. But when I brushed around parts of the bell housing it created a resonating sound that sounded like the violin section of an orchestra warming up. That was a nice change.

We slaved away in the grease pit but we were really running out of funds. We had to find jobs time now. By the middle of November we were both working. When I was looking for employment on Craigs list I came across something that sounded like it would suit AJ. The add was looking for extra hands in a composites shop, and rebuilding a small aircraft. AJ loves building and had always wanted to build a plane. AJ contacted the guy and went to work for him immediately.

We could not have even dreamed of a better place for AJ to land. I still can't say for sure what AJ's employer does per se, but he has a carbon fiber composite shop and makes prototypes of boats and small airplanes and a all sorts of things. He is an engineer and inventor. AJ started going to work from 8-5 for Mark.  Mark is making a trimaran that will use a 42' mast. The exact height we need our mast to be. Mark said that if AJ would make the mold for the mast he needs then he would let him make a carbon fiber mast for himself for cost. His cost. Which is virtually nothing. In exchange Mark got a mold he could use again and again. This would mean lack of cash flow but what we would get in return would be worth so much more than he could ever make.  Our mast problem is solved. Mark is also letting AJ make the boom he wants too. The time frame for completing this is unknown, as while the mast and boom molds are on the list, Mark still has other things that need to be worked on in the mean time. But it is worth it for a carbon fiber mast and boom.

For three weeks we rarely saw each other as we scurried to our jobs and back. We had bought another rowing dinghy from someone at the marina for cheap, so we were able to come and go as we needed separately. Funny how you don't notice certain stressers until they are gone. The independence the second dinghy bestowed greatly reduced my overall stress levels. We no longer had to synchronize or get stranded. The weather was cooling off by the middle of November and increased activity became easy. Life became easier. I rowed back and forth multiple times a day. I rarely vistited the lounge because rowing back to my own home on a two hour mid day break no longer meant getting soaked in sweat.  It was now the season in Florida, and the marina was filling up. There were people everywhere.  Parking spaces on the dinghy dock were becoming scarce. I was becoming good at rowing and maneuvering the dinghy around all the other boats.

The sun was starting to set earlier and earlier though, and without electric light there was not much we could do after dark.  We had less and less time to work on the boat.  I would often forget to start looking for the flashlight before the sun was setting and thought about how creating such a habit after 29 years of flicking light switches with no knowledge of the sun's position might be a challenge. But then I remembered that we would have electricity again. I had forgotten that power was even going to be part of life on a boat, and was resigned to it.  This is the good part of living like this. Instead of being pissed every time you don't have power, you get to become excited and happy when you do. I don't know anyone who get's a mood boost from turning on a light, or plugging in their cell phone charger. Being pissed when things don't work has been replaced with a sense of luxury and happiness when they do.

Cooking by headlamp light:

   
Mag light set in the engine ropes for the evenings.

The weeks were going by and we were never home to work on the engine or improve our living arrangement. We were still without power and water and still having to climb around an engine.

When we finally got a weekend to dedicate to our boat it rained. And rained, and rained. The parts were getting wet again. We could not do anything. And I had dropped the netbook in the rain water in the dinghy. Our last and only modern convenience, a crappy wifi signal, was gone. No living space, no power, now no computer. To make matters worse AJ had found out that fuel injector pump and the spare were both bad, and one had to be rebuilt. We were dreading that verdict as the rebuild is not cheap. We felt defeated and AJ was really depressed. He talked about abandoning this engine all together. Finding a used engine that would fit pulling out the credit card and calling it done. But the more we talked we decided our engine had to be finished. There was too much sunk into it already and it was really close to done, we just did not have the proper time or space to do it in. Work took up most of our time, but life on the ball took all the rest leaving us stagnating.

Crisis, depression, drastic re-evaluation and deconstruction of your situation. That Saturday we sat on the boat in the rain and started from scratch. Why are we here and what are we doing? We decided we had to move to the docks. It is more expensive than the mooring ball, but we finally realized that time is also money. And in our predicament, more money than the dock. We would be able to do so much in so little time that it would save us a few months on the ball. On the dock we would have access to a power supply and water hose. We could use the hose on the engine room and the deck.  Water would no longer be a limited resource, as we could fill up our sprayer right there on the boat with the hose, saving a 30 min trip for every 6 gallons we bring on board. We would be able to plug into an outlet with an extension cord and use power tools. We could toss anything off the boat and out of the way when needed. Taking out the enormous amounts of trash accumulated during projects would be as simple as stepping off the boat and tossing it in a bin 4 feet away. We could actually utilize the time we did have.

We also needed to get the engine off the boat. If it had not been in the cabin for the last two months then we could have been working on other projects, any and all of them. But as we were we could do nothing but wait for the engine to go back in. We probably should have moved to the docks day one and powered through the other than engine projects. But you live and learn. AJ called his boss and asked if we could use his engine hoist and take it to his shop for the rebuild. He said sure, so we went straight to the marina office to inquire about getting a spot on the dock. And to find out if they would tow us to it. Yes and yes. They had one spot left on D dock. We woke up depressed and hopeless and went to bed with the boat ready to be docked in the morning. Ready to whip the boat into shape. It was December 11^th.

Wham Bam we are almost up to speed.

Some pretty Pics of November:

Dinghies Sparrow and Sunshine sailing at sunset

Bird on our Mooring Ball