Starship Enterprise

After the completion of my Great Water Project, Tim said my sink area looks like the Starship Enterprise. We now have (left to right) a dish soap dispenser, a double-filtered drinking water dispenser, a pressure water faucet (that we almost never use), and a filtered foot pump faucet. All of this required rebuilding the Shurflo water pump with a rebuild kit since the part replaced by the rebuild kit had flaking paint on it that got into the pump guts and tore the very delicate rubber gasket that's inside. This gasket, like all other things marine, is weirdly designed with only half of the width of it being supported by the flange of the pump, and the other half of it hanging out in the interior space of the pump where it is subject to being torn. A slightly longish trip to the West Marine in Annapolis (ummmm nobody told me there were multiple West Marines in Annapolis so of course I went to the wrong one...) I got the kit installed and put back together with success. A quick test and the pump kicked on, pressured and kicked off. Feeling pretty smug, off we went for a delicious dinner at my nephew's house and a good night's sleep on our return. I woke up at 6:20 to the water pressure pump, which I had neglected to turn off. Damn. I spent a few minutes on various forums trying to decide what to do and the symptom most closely related to mine (running and not turning off), was air in the system due to a leak. I looked below the sink and yes, there was a small leak. I tightened up an errant hose clamp on one of the water lines, opened up all the faucets and turned the pump on. After a few sputters the tone of the pump changed and water came out full force. Close the faucets, pump kicks off. While these discoveries may be painfully obvious to some of you (yes, Bill I was thinking of you), I'm a Shurflo novice so bear with me.

Last week I installed the double filter faucet system for the drinking water into the foot pump line, only to discover that the foot pump couldn't handle the high pressure, low volume filter setup. I moved that filter into the cold water line for the pressure pump faucet and purchased one of those low pressure, high volume inline filters that you use on the hose when you fill your tanks outside. I installed it in the out line of the foot pump so now we have filtered water on the foot pump just in case we lose the electricity and can't use the drinking faucet.




Redundancy, folks

Since I was on a roll, I also made a few modifications to my homemade dish drainer / silverware drainer so it would sit lower in the sink for more stability.  All in all it was a pretty productive 2 days. Now it's on to sewing various covers for all the stuff we've added above decks.

Leak repair day two

Yesterday was a tough day. Today looked to be more of the same but when a fight can’t be avoided it is best to step in angry and swinging and looking to make something happen. Right off two things seemed obvious. The first was that, once again, Kintala was suffering the after effects of another seriously defective repair. The second was that the rudder would need to come down to be sure of fixing it for good and for true. The Senior Boat Guru in these parts agreed so I waded into the fray with grinder locked and loaded.

It turns out pulling the rudder isn’t that big of a deal; so long as one has a 40 ton travel lift nearby that can pick the keel about six feet off the ground. All of the assorted lines and cables and pulleys associated with the primary and wind vane steering system were removed as part of dropping the rudder which also allowed pretty good access to the area needing repaired. Well, pretty good for a place buried under the cockpit and about as deep in the boat as one can go.

Several hours of work later it became clear that having this happen may have averted a serious, perhaps fatal, problem.
The repair at the base of the rudder tube was so badly done that, eventually, it simply had to fail. Instead of fiberglass tape and resin some fool had spooged epoxy paste around the base of the rudder tube. Not thickened epoxy resin, just run-of-the-mill epoxy past; brittle and prone to cracks when flexed. Flexing is inevitable given two months of picking the boat, putting it on stands, putting it on a truck, driving 800 plus miles, and picking it two more times, and is something which would assuredly happen even worse pounding into building weather. Not only was the wrong material applied, it was applied in an appallingly bad manor. I ground a flat washer out from the middle of the spooge. It was like finding a cockroach baked into your pancake.

In addition, the rudder is held on by an impressive bronze fitting that bolts through the skeg and clamps around the rudder shaft (called a “shoe”). Six bolts hold this thing together. On Kintala, one bolt was simply too short; shoved in the hole and held in place by bottom paint it wasn’t actually holding anything. Three of the other bolt holes had the threads stripped from them. I didn't strip them getting them out. Someone stripped them putting them in. All that was holding them is place was friction. There were just two bolts holding this unit together; two bolts holding the rudder on the boat. This was a failure destined to happen. If the leak didn’t doom the boat first, the mount would fail in a way that would jam the rudder IF it didn’t just fall out of the boat altogether.




The fix is going to take several days. Since the steering is apart anyway it seems best to replace the cables as well. They are 30 years old and damaged by yet another bit of appallingly poor maintenance. I’m still a bit discouraged and more than a bit angry. Some of what I am finding on this boat is not just lazy and stupid and low rent, it borders on criminal negligence. The good news there are few places left on the boat where such work can hide. So all it not lost just yet.

Boats sometimes just disappear and fade into mystery. From what I have seen of this industry some of those disasters must be the result of truly horrid maintenance finally catching someone out at the worst possible time. (Which has me thinking delivery Captains are about the boldest people I've run across lately. Take an old boat whose service history is unknown off to some distant shore? I'd rather repo airplanes.)

As bad, and as lingering, as yesterday's disappointment was, it is still better than having the rudder fall out of the boat 100 miles out to sea in building weather. But this should not have happened at all.

Kintala hates me ...

that's what it is. I don't know why she hates me but, all I wanted to do was add some roller bearing drawer sliders. The drawers in the aft cabin use wood on wood sliders. You know, like the ones you find in the quality of furniture that comes with assembly directions written in four languages and relies on plastic buttons to hold the whole thing together. Load them up with anything heavier than a couple of pairs of socks and a T-shirt and opening them is like dragging Velcro across itself. We use these drawers to store things like tools and spare parts, thus making every opening is an exercise in frustration. Roller bearing sliders to make life easier; a couple of measurements, a few screws, what could possibly go wrong?

Feeling pretty sure of myself since the table project has been getting rave reviews, with yet another weekend of constant heavy rain curtailing any outside projects, and having the new sets of shiny, easy rolling sliders in my fat little fist, I took to measuring and screwing. Such a project undertaken at home would consume an hour, so on a boat; maybe a day. And that's about what it took since the framing around each of the drawers had to be notched for each slider; three drawers = six sliders working in a somewhat tight space with pretty poor lighting. Set the drawers in the new sliders, a few more screws and ... and ...

... and the drawers wouldn't fit. It is a bit of a long story and hard to explain, but all said and done the drawers are now about 3/16s of an inch too wide. Yep, three lousy, tiny, sixteenths of an inch ... that would be 3/32s of an inch on each side. Various options were considered but in the end the only hope is to take my handy little router tool and shave some wood from each side. Except, well, I might have overworked my handy little router tool a bit during the table build. Right at the end of the job some of the magic smoke leaked out and now it doesn't work anymore. On the way home from the lake we stopped by Harbor Freight to buy another handy little router tool. (I promise to be more gentle with this one.) Tomorrow I'll try my hand at drawer shaving.

Really? Each side, 3/32s of an inch? Anyone who claims the sea is a harsh mistress has never met my boat.

Still, not all was spite and frustration. We pulled the water proof cover off of the hatch we re-bedded a few months ago and let it set out in the rain. Much to my delight it actually appears as if it doesn't leak anymore. Only one hatch and four more ports to go. Items which Deb suggested be added to the list; which led to a more serious problem.

For you see, friends and neighbors, I was forced to confess that I threw my to-do list away several months ago.

I know. I talk about the list all the time. And I know, the list is a holy item among boaters. I'm not sure one can claim to belong to the congregation of the sea and not have a "to-do" list enshrined somewhere. Deb had entrusted me with the sacred duty of keeping of the list. And so I strove to live up to expectations, mislead my trusting Wife into thinking I was working off the list, and lying to you Good Readers. And I am rightly ashamed.

But alas, the demands of the list became too great. Things were being added to the bottom of the list faster than I could remove them from the top of the list. I'd work harder. The list would grow faster. It bedeviled me, this list. Laughed at me, taunted me with mountains of work undone and projects untouched. I struggled to live up to the demands of the list, but like all poor sinners was left wanting.

So I threw the damned thing in the trash.

That's right, I have no list. If a hatch drips on my head, I'll get around to fixing the leak. Some improvement that we can do to make the boat more like home catches my eye, I'll give it a thought and see what I can do. But list? Sorry. I'm never going to remember all of the things I have done to this boat. And I don't really care about all the things that need done to the boat. Right now I am fixing drawers. After that I might fix leaks, or I might remount a winch, or maybe something else will pop up that I'll do. Maybe I'll just get a beer and watch the sun set.

For I have discovered that working on the boat is boating.  Working on things was something I used to like to do ... and I am going to like it again.  Having a to-do list for boat projects is like having a list for morning projects: take a pee, brush teeth, make some coffee. That isn't a list, that is just living.

And all I want to do is live on my boat.