Haulout 2013, Day Twenty-Four

by Jay on October 7, 2013 in Recipes

There comes a point in every haulout when we just want it to be over. We hoped for Day 21. We planned for Day 22. We stretched for Day 23. We prayed for Day 24. But none of it was meant to be. Now it’s looking like Day 26 or 27.

I thought we were ready on Day 23. I paid the overtime to launch on a Saturday, but when Billy put the boat in the water, we had bad leaks from the shaft seals.

Most boats seal their shafts with a stuffing box that drips a little all the time. We prefer a dry bilge and have Lasdrop “dripless” seals. The irony of a “dripless” seal is that if it leaks at all, you’re completely screwed because it probably can’t be fixed in the water.

Billy pulled the boat back out and I spent Saturday evening communicating with Lasdrop and trying short-term remedies. You gotta love a company when you can get the president on the phone at 8:30 on a Saturday night.

My short-term solution was to polish the surfaces of the seal with some 400 grit sandpaper. I had high hopes for this and called Billy at 10am Sunday morning to give launching another try.

No dice. Billy put the boat in the water, but the seals still leaked and we had to pull her back out again.

Now we need to go for the long-term solution and replace the seals entirely. The company has more remedies, but I’m not messing around.

Why we didn’t do this from the get-go is a very good question. We replaced everything else in the engine rooms. Why not the shaft seals? I don’t really know. Because they didn’t seem to need it? The cost is insignificant to the overall project and certainly to the expense of our sanity at this point.

The new seals won't arrive until Day 26 and it will be a stretch get them installed and the boat launched all in one day.

The good news is that the engines run like tractors. We did little more than start them and put them in gear, but they’re ready to plow a field. We had to crank for about half a second before they fired for the first time. Very encouraging.

The detritus of the project has begun to disperse into the trash, man van, or recesses of the boat as appropriate. Spice has rediscovered the rug.

Haulout 2013, Day Twenty-One

by Jay on October 3, 2013 in Recipes

Day 21. On which we learn that the Suburban does not have a low fuel light, and that 1/8 of a tank on the gauge is dead-flat-won’t start-empty. It took 2 hours of troubleshooting to figure out, but the solution was satisfactory. No faith was lost in the Suburban, and no egos were damaged. How a vehicle that gets 13 MPG and has silly features like heated electric memory leather seats doesn’t have a low fuel warning light is beyond me. So we blame GM for that one.

On the boat front, we got the cutless bearings out, but then were immediately reminded that the struts and stern tubes are metric, 40 and 43mm respectively, while the shafts are imperial — well, almost imperial, 1.245” to be exact. So we need to buy new bearings with inside diameters that match the shafts, and then have them turned down so the outside diameters match the boat. More fun at the machine shop!

But no, because this is Ft Pierce, Florida and there aren’t four inch-and-a-quarter cutless bearings in this town. That little lack of foresight will cost us a day, and without a miracle puts a Day 22 launch out of reach. Day 23 is a Saturday, and getting Billy to run the lift on a Saturday is going to cost me several cases of Miller Lite.

We're on the homestretch. I'm sleeping on the boat in the yard now and Tanya is imposing on my mom in Clearwater. Thanks Mom!

Haulout 2013, Day Twenty

by Jay on October 2, 2013 in Recipes

We finally got the shafts back this afternoon, but too late to do anything with them. What was only supposed to take two days, took nearly a week. The whole project has been like that, but I’m still hoping to get back in the water on Day 22. If we don’t make that, then I’ll have to bribe Billy to run the Travel Lift on a weekend. We can’t be without our home any longer.

Machining the collar for the starboard stern tube didn’t go so well – the fiberglass kept breaking. So instead we’ll use a piece of 2” heat shrink tubing. It’s probably only slightly better than the layer of hose that was there before, but it’s what we’ve got.

Another problem has raised its head. When the new shafts go in, it will be with new cutless bearings. Of course, we wait until the day before to try and get the old bearings out, and I can’t get them out for anything. The next step will be to use the reciprocating saw (yeah!) to cut through the bearing WITHOUT cutting into the stern tube. I can’t wait.

The boat has to be moved tomorrow. There’s a boat behind us that is going back in the water and we’re in the way. Moving the boats around the yard is like a puzzle game sometimes.

The starboard engine is caught up to the port one now. The raw water plumbing is finished and the start battery is installed.

Haulout 2013, Day Nineteen

by Jay on October 1, 2013 in Recipes

We started hooking up the starboard engine today. Fuel filter and fuel lines are done. Raw water strainer is done. Still need to insert a vented loop between the heat exchanger and the exhaust elbow. Still need to install the battery, cables, and switch.

The port engine only needs a shaft, alignment, exhaust, and controls connected. Oh, and I almost forgot — a bilge pump. I'm not counting the secondary alternators as part of the engine installation. They need bigger cables run to the batteries and connection to the regulators. But you can see the space cut out for it in the image below.

The shafts should be ready in the morning. Hopefully we’ll have the shafts in, engines aligned and bolted down tomorrow. But there is a small additional complication. The shaft seals are sized for a 2” stern tube, but the stern tubes are more like 1.9”, probably something metric. On the port side they made a collar of some phenolic material to go over the stern tube and size it up to 2”. On the starboard side, there was a very thin piece of hose. That hose is not going to fly. Instead we’re going to take a piece of 2” OD fiberglass tube, mill it out to about 1.9”, and epoxy it onto the starboard stern tube. That has to be done before the starboard shaft can go in.

Another complication is that one of the bolts on the front right motor mount is completely obscured by the secondary alternator bracket. We should have drilled an access hole through the bracket before we put it on the engine. Actually, Beta should have done it before even sending it to me. This is definitely a double-jointed 8-year-old scenario. I’m not sure how were going to resolve it yet. Taking it off the engine and putting it in a drill press would be a delay at this point.

Fabrication of the exhaust surge chamber/gooseneck is ongoing. I think Ben is a welder trapped in a man’s body. Or something like that.

The highlight of my day was drilling a 1.125” hole through the bottom for the new generator thru-hull/seacock/strainer. The hull here at the leading edge of the keel is 7/8” thick. Our information about Take Two is that her hulls are made with strip planked red cedar, and the plug we drilled out smelled distinctly of cedar, which was cool.

Haulout 2013, Day Eighteen

by Jay on September 30, 2013 in Recipes

We’re behind schedule. Today is Day 18 and we’re trying to launch on Day 22, which is the day we lose the condo.

If I were trying to be positive, I would start with what has been accomplished in the last five days. Soo… the port engine is almost completely hooked up! The raw water thru-hull, strainer, vented loop have all been installed. The battery, switch, and cables have all been installed. The fuel hose and filter have been installed.

I know that sounds like one day of work, but it isn’t. Along the way, lots of things have been changed. I’m trying hard not to let the place look like it was put together by a double-jointed 8-year-old. It’s hard.

All the port engine still needs is an exhaust system. The new exhaust ports have been installed, but the surge chambers are still being fabricated. I’m reluctant to put exhaust hose on the engine until it has been aligned to the shaft.

Oh, the shafts! When we left off on Day 13 the propeller shafts had been put back in to figure out rough engine placement, and we determined that we needed some shims to raise the engines an inch before we could make a final decision. We should have just used wood shims, but instead we lost a couple days while steel shims were fabricated.

When we finally got the shafts to the prop shop, they said we can’t use the new coupling flanges that came with the engines because they don’t fit the old shafts, new shafts they have in stock won’t fit our propellers, and our old flanges won’t fit the new transmissions. Ugh. The most expedient solution is to fabricate new coupling flanges for the old shafts. That’s fine, but it takes time.

Otherwise, the patched thru-hulls need to be faired and painted. The props need to be adjusted, reinstalled, and painted. A new thru-hull needs to be installed for the generator. Oh, and all that stuff that we did for the port engine still needs to be done on the starboard side.

So tired.

When Your Home is Also a Vehicle

by Tanya on September 30, 2013 in General

One of the realities of a haul-out is the mess—inside and out—that comes from dismantling things and emptying storage areas and bringing in parts and tools for the work that needs to be done. Also there’s the dirt that comes in from the boat-yard itself, which is an alarming mix of paint dust, dangerous chemical residues, salt, and dirt. Even if they let us live aboard while the boat is in the yard, I would not want to.

I normally think of our home as being a cozy, self-contained, orderly kind of place—even if everything isn’t in its place, everything has a place and a purpose. If we have not achieved the simplicity we idealized in our youth, we’ve come awfully close. And one of the things that makes life simple is that we travel in our home. Everything we need for a fulfilling life fits in or on our 48 x 26-foot vessel. The line between “house” and “boat” is indistinguishably thin. Because the engines aren’t separate from the living space, the current project makes the boat uninhabitable and her crew vagabonds.

I peek in every now and then to see the progress, but to be truthful, I feel a little overwhelmed when I climb up the ladder to the transom and step inside. I take a deep breath and tell myself that all this detritus will be re-stowed or removed, the boat-yard dust will be scrubbed away, our boat will go back in the water, a faster, more reliable version of her former self, and our home will go back to containing the organized chaos that is our life aboard. Though I know that this is just a temporary state, at the moment, I wish I had a pair of ruby slippers so I could just go home.

Haulout 2013, Day Thirteen

by Jay on September 25, 2013 in Recipes

The crane came this morning and by noon we had both engines and the generator in the boat. Not installed, mind you, but at least sitting inside the boat.

The engines are a tight, tight fit. This was mostly expected, but it looks alot different on paper. I also forgot to account for the size of the flexible couplings. They're optional, and I think we're going to opt not to use them. We’re making some shims to raise the engines an inch before finalizing decisions about engine placement, flexible couplings, and shaft length.

We have decided to use the thru-hull in the back of the engine spaces, and fill in the one in front. This is opposite from our plan on Day 11 and if we’d had the right thru-hulls then, we might have regretted it. There's just no room at the front of the engine for the seacock or the strainer. We're also going to need a smaller bilge pump, which probably means a second bigger pump somewhere else.

We haven’t fitted the secondary alternators yet. That should be interesting. There’s a shelf that might have to go.

I hope everyone got to see some of the America’s Cup, or at least was aware it was going on. It really was amazing. With 72-foot foiling catamarans going 40 knots, it’s a lot like watching NASCAR. And not just the boats are incredible, but also the racing itself. At one point New Zealand was leading 8-1 and only need one more win to take the Cup. USA rallied and won 8 races in a row to keep it. It’s good stuff, and it’s all on YouTube.

Haulout 2013, Day Twelve

by Jay on September 24, 2013 in Recipes

Ugh. I predicted a lag was coming, and it was a doozy. Five days now.

No crane today, ostensibly due to weather. Of course it hardly rained at all. But I try not to get upset about this kind of thing. We have a rule on Take Two: “don’t push a bad situation”. That applies equally to iffy navigational situations, dinner plans gone awry, and heavy objects suspended above the boat. It’s better to be patient and let things happen in their own time.

I’m still optimistic about the week. All the parts are in hand except the ones we’ll have fabricated. I bet we'll be ready to splash with days to spare.

I’d seen a few ants on the boat over the last few days. Mostly around the galley sink. I didn’t think a whole lot about it at first. We’ve seen little ants from time to time, and I figured they lived aboard somewhere and were just taking advantage of Tanya not being around. Then I realized they weren’t our ants, they were boatyard ants. They were climbing up the block, up the hull, into the sink thru-hull, up the sink drain, into the sink, and onto the counter. I don’t know exactly what they were after, but they were very busy. I figured I’d better intervene, so this morning I sprayed the blocks and thru-hull on the outside, and set out bait stations inside. By this afternoon the ant activity was seriously diminished. I wonder what’s going on in the unattended boats nearby.

Haulout 2013, Day Eleven

by Jay on September 24, 2013 in Recipes

It was a slow day. We realized early on that Take Two’s hull was over 1.5 inches thick and the 2.5” thru-hulls we had weren’t going to work. It looked like we were going to have to buy the extra long ones and cut them down. Of course, West Marine had nothing in stock. So we had to postpone a day while new thru-hulls are shipped in, which probably means doing the thru-hulls after the engines are put in the boat.

We did make some design decisions. Placement of the generator thru-hull has been very challenging. How to minimize the hose run, from the maximum depth, with the fewest elbows, and use a strainer that is easy to clean? I think this design is going to fit the bill.

It eliminates any plumbing between the ball valve and the strainer, particularly any bends where something would be likely to get stuck. It seems more likely that anything that gets sucked up (like little fishes) could swim or fall out when the suction stops. And the whole thing fits nicely down in the bilge, saving valuable space.

We also made some progress on the engine exhaust design. Our exhaust ports are very close to the waterline and there is the potential that waves could fill the exhaust system and flood the engine. Not wanting to rely solely on a rubber flapper to keep the water out, and also wanting to reduce “sneezing” from the exhaust, we’re prototyping a surge chamber to go just inboard of the exhaust ports.

It rained all afternoon, so not much else got done. I did finish running the new engine wire harnesses.

Haulout 2013, Days Nine and Ten

by Jay on September 22, 2013 in Recipes

While the boat is out of the water we’ve rented a condo on the beach to be our base of operations. Tanya travels with the kids during the week and the condo is little more to me than a place to crash. But weekends are different and we play hard. After a week in Atlanta, the kids were ready for some salt water.

Our normal beach spot has a nice surf break for the older kids and a gentle grade where Rachel can play, but we couldn’t find any places to rent that had good surfing conditions. The beach at our condo is good for only one thing… getting pounded by waves.

We’ve joined a sailing center here in Ft Pierce. Our membership gives us unlimited access to the center’s Hobie cats, Lasers, 420s, Flying Scots, Optis, wind surfers, SUPs, and kayaks. The three older kids are enrolled in weekend classes for learning to sail and race Optimist prams, while Tanya and I take the younger kids sailing in a bigger boat.

The new week will mean a new phase of the repower project. It’s out with the old, and in with the new. I’ve already installed the new engine panels and begun running the new wiring harnesses. I think by Day Twelve we should be putting the new engines in the boat.