Author Archives: Michael

It’s Alive!

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After month’s of preparation, worry and doubt about whether we could actually pull this off, The new Beta diesel drew her first breath aboard Andromeda

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As you can hear,despite Shawn’s declarations, it is not exactly quiet. The control brackets are still loose and rattling and we have a few other adjustments to make. I expect we will be able to dampen the noise more as we complete the final adjustments

One adjustment that had to be made right away was to move the starboard mounting rail outboard a bit. The engine was hitting it and creating a loud knock

Engine rail is impinging on engine mount support. This made a lot of noise.

Shawn was able to gain some space by moving the rail outboard a bit which stopped the clanking but now we have to grind out the mounting hole to fit two of the bolts in. That will be a messy nuisance. No doubt, we will be repaint some of the engine room after the boat is back in the water.

One of the challenges to starting the engine on the hard was getting water to the engine. Without raw water, we would only have been able to run the engine for a couple of minutes (with the raw water impeller removed). For some reason this seemed like a difficult problem as the only available water is some distance away at the travel lift. In the end, the problem was easily solved with a run to the hardware store for an extra water hose which allowed me to extend the existing hoses to our boat. Using a five gallon bucket, we were able to create a fairly flexible cooling system.

Our ersatz raw water system

This coming weekend I will install the control cables and, hopefully the steering system. If Shawn can open up the holes on the engine rails, and re-install the mounting bolts, the engine will be done until we are back in the water and ready for our final alignment.

I am also happy to report that the fuel system I installed worked beautifully and, amazingly, no leaks. Shawn had suggested that  I install a valve on the return line so that I could vent fuel into a container when priming the engine. I did that and added a switch into the system which allows me to run the fuel pump from the engine room to aid in filling the filters and priming the engine. Everything works well and the fuel looks good.

And Shawn made progress repairing the fiberglass. I really appreciated seeing how he approached this repair. Take a look.

After saturating the area with resin, Shawn stuffed long strands of glass around the the roughed up area. The green stuff is last week’s Kitty Hair.

Shawn applies more resin and drives it into the glass with a resin roller.

Next comes a bit of roving. Again wetted out with resin

 

Two more layers of a somewhat finer cloth and more resin brings us to this.

Shawn completed this repair in between engine adjustments. The actual time involved in building up the fiberglass to what you see here was probably twenty minutes. Pretty amazing. I think he wants to put down one more layer of finer cloth to help in fairing the repair and then a different kind of resin to cap the whole area. After that, a bit of sanding and antifouling paint that little chore will be done. As you can see, the bronze fitting has been moved out of the way to facilitate the fiberglass repair so that will be re-installed and then the prop  will be properly seated on the shaft.

Finally, lest you think that all I do is work on this damn boat every weekend, I’ll leave you with a photo of my latest hangout in Astoria. The Rogue Public House is on the east side of town which I rarely visit, until now. The Rogue brewery is well known in the Pacific Northwest especially for the Dead Guy Ale. Well you can have that and about twenty other interesting beers, ales and stouts. This being winter, they have about five delicious stouts on tap. Awesome pub food, a no cell phone policy all in an old Bumble Bee Tuna Cannery.

Work is our Joy. Couldn’t have said it better, comrade bee.

Stay tuned. Next week, Lord willing, we will actually be able to steer the boat!

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

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Those of us with children from the last thirty years or so will remember the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I am that mouse.

I schlepped down to Astoria this past Saturday with visions of actually firing up the new engine only to bogged down in the minutia of actually providing the engine with power, fuel and a way to exhuast fumes and water outside boat. You know, important stuff.

Getting DC power to the engine was not too terrible. The act of tracing the wiring system back to the batteries and battery switch is giving me some sense of mastery over that system. But like any cookie lovin’ mouse, every contact I see must be removed, cleaned with emery paper and protected with Corrosion Block. There are a lot of battery cables on this boat. Still, my little OCD brain could not stand to see even a single electron impeded by corrosion. No Electron Left Behind!

And as long as I am cleaning cables (and removing a few) I might as well replace the old battery switch with the new Blue Seas Add-A-Battery system. We added one of these to our Cal 34 and I recommend it highly. The manual switch is essentially two single pole switches with a combine function. A voltage sensing SCR automatic battery combiner takes care of isolating the batteries when a charging source is not present but combines the batteries once the start battery indicates that it is fully charged.

As long as I was touching the DC, I might as well install the new Add-A-Battery Switch

Currently, I cannot add the SCR because I have a traditional 8D battery for the start battery but six volt AGMs for the house bank. The AGMs are pretty close to end of life, so I will replace them with the Trojan T105s (or similar) so that I can use the same charger profile for house and start batteries.. The boat came with a Balmar voltage regulator which I intend to use as well but I haven’t included that in the current charging scheme. this mouse has quite enough cookies, thank you.

Add-A-Battery Switch installed

With the battery hooked up to the engine, I was able to celebrate the small victory of powering up the control panel.

Lights, lighting, Buzzers buzzing. The engine is almost alive.

Truth be told, I don’t really like how I laid out the power cables and will probably end up moving them. I think they represent too much of a trip hazard in the engine room. I will probably have to fabricate longer cables so that I can route them safely.

With the electrical systems sort of done, I now needed to get fuel to the system. This is another project that seems to have no end. I had the fuel filters in place but because the tanks are more than a foot below the engine, I needed to add an electric fuel pump. Add the fun of plumbing a flammable liquid to a minor electrical project and you will understand how many trips to the chandlery and Home Depot I made for this project.

More wires and hoses added to our pretty white panel. The fuel relay and override switch are in the upper left hand corner.

I wanted to be able to manually engage the fuel pump with a switch so that I could prime the system during mainentance. That meant a few extra components. I ended up putting a four inch square box on the wall to house my switch, interposing relay and any future doodads that may be needed.I still need to dress the cables and finish the final hook up, but I should be able to knock that out in an hour (laugh along with me, won’t you?)

Sunday morning in Astoria was blowing about twenty knots with gusts much higher and a a nasty, mean rain that just seemed to scream “stay inside you dolt!” I texted our diesel mechanic, Shawn Thur and told him that conditions were crummy for finishing the fiberglass on the keel. I could tell he was really upset about not being able to stand outside in a driving rain, even in a text message. But that took some pressure off of me to finish some of the other projects one of which has been going on for weeks now; the exhaust system.

I’ll spare you the complete tale of woe. Suffice to say that getting a hose from the exhaust riser to the water muffler, a distance of less than two feet, has been a challenge. In fact, that short distance is the reason for the difficulties. Anyone that has tried to bend exhaust hose will testify that two feet is not enough room to make any kind of bend. The solution? Centek fiberglass elbows. I tried to make the turns with 45 degree elbows but had to settle for 90 degree parts. In the end, the exhaust riser to muffle is almost entirely fiberglass with short pieces of rubber hose joining the the hard parts.

Frankenstein’s muffler

For the kids counting at home, that’s twelve T-bolt hose clamps.

The short distance to the muffler hopefully will mitigate the additional back pressure created by the two 90s. I expect that someone will post with a superior solution to this problem. I only ask that you be gentle.

This week may find us with a running engine but I won’t hold my breath. The weather here has been pretty crummy; lots of rain and wind but reasonably warm. Will we start the engine? Tune in next week.

Creeping Towards Victory: Part Two

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Earlier, I shared how we had finally sealed the cockpit sole/engine room. Well that was so last Saturday. The real action occurred on Sunday when Shawn Thur, our Diesel Mechanic, came down to finish the alignment of the engine and start the repair on the cuts that were made to remove the cutless bearing.

Adding insult to injury. Shawn takes a Skilsaw to the boat.

Since the work to repair the keel would require some time to allow the resin to cure, Shawn got right to work prepping the area.

Rough and Ready for the Repair

Using a Skilsaw and and a sander, Shawn roughed up the surface of the existing fiberglass with a Skilsaw. Another lesson learned. This looks like a superior preparation for laying on new material.

 

Kitty Hair. Looks like something you pull from your shower drain but is incredibly strong and versatile.

to pack in around the new nipple that houses the cutless bearing, Shawn uses a product called Kitty Hair. This is a polyester resin with long strand fiberglass mixed in. While not an epoxy resin, it is waterproof and considerably easier to use than plain resin and woven glass.

This Kitty Hair makes packing fiberglass around the new cutless bearing nipple very easy. Shawn leaves the top rough for the next layer.

A closeup of the the Kitty Hair

From what I have read so far, this product is essentially the same as what was used in during the manufacture of the boat but in a very convenient and easy to use package. Add a little cream hardener,mix and you you are ready to repair just about anything.

While the initial layers of this repair were hardening, Shawn and I went below to begin the final alignment of the engine.

The main issue with finalizing the alignment was that the ass-end of the engine needed to drop another quarter inch. To accomplish this, Shawn picked up nuts that were only half as thick as the nuts that came with the stock engine mounts. Even with these nuts, we ran down pretty close to the bottom of the feet. That is not a bad thing as it lowers the center of gravity of the engine and applies less torque to the engine mount studs.

 

These nuts are half the thickness of the stock nuts.

Once Shawn had replaced the leveling nuts, he could then finish aligning the engine coupling to the shaft coupling. I don’t have any photos of that alignment as Shawn was hogging all the space. But he was making noises that sounded positive. Using a dial micrometer with a magnetic base, he had me slowly turn the shaft to check the alignment. By the time he was done, the shaft was within 1/1000 of an inch. With that kind of tolerance, finishing up the coupling was pretty easy. This coming weekend, I want to at least lay hands on these nuts and bolts to make sure I am clear on how they are adjusted. I think a lick of paint on some of these parts wouldn’t go amiss. The feet are not stainless and the engine coupling was already showing rust spots even though it looked like stainless.

I think Shawn was ready to fire up the engine after all of this work was done but I have only roughed in the electrical and fuel systems to the engine. That will be priorities one and two when I get to Astoria this week end. I also have new parts for the exhaust system which I hope will allow me to finish that project.

Shawn is proposing that we pull the impeller from the raw water pump and run the engine for a few minutes with just the fresh water recirculating for a few minutes. On the hard, I have no readily available freshwater which I could use to run the raw water pump. The yard is persnickety about folks using water on their boats lest we start flushing copper paint into the Columbia River. I was thinking that I could dump 30 or so gallons into the bilge and use that for my raw water supply. Thoughts, anyone?

Finally, I’ll leave you with this beautiful photo of the new prop. This was hung on the new shaft to facilitate the alignment.

Shiny

Beautiful new prop.

I have the old prop which I plan to have cleaned, balanced and saved as a spare. It may not be as structurally able as this baby, but it will be a nice backup.