Category Archives: Boat Work Projects

It’s A New Year’s Post with a Cheap Boat Trick

Posted on by

Shhh. Galapagos is sleeping. She’s hibernating during this very cold part of the winter, just trying to conserve energy for the sailing season that is right around the corner; when the sun comes back to stay in the sky for longer and the weather gets above freezing. That’s right. We tiptoe around the subject of boat ownership in the winter. We don’t want to stir that pot too much. It’s not a very satisfying time to own a boat; those months between fall and spring. These are the times when you just write that moorage check and look the other way.

We took a New Year’s walk down at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, which is about 5 miles from the house. A great way to see the water.

In terms of boat work, Mike has been a more dedicated soul than I have. I check on her during the week to be sure she is well tied and safe. He trudges down to the marina on the weekends and does a little of this and a little of that. This week he finished a small project that had been nagging at him for awhile. He had replaced the fuel gauge and the new one was smaller than the old one so you know what that means. Right. The existing hole was too big for the new unit. He hemmed and hawed for awhile about how to mount the thing where it would look decent in the cockpit and keep water out of the cabin. Star Board? Sure, if you want to buy a big piece. He didn’t. Wood? Yeah, we don’t really have the right tools/skills for that. No go. The solution came to him during a nap. Mike does some of his most creative thinking during his naps. You get to benefit from his solution.

You know those round plastic discs that people put on the wall where a door handle would hit? They protect the wall from being injured by people flinging doors around indiscriminately. They also do a dandy job of becoming a mounting plate for a fuel gauge. Just drill a hole for the gauge and Bob’s Your Uncle, there you go. Cost: about 3$, and available at any local hardware store. He’s a smart man.

Neat and tidy!

I gave up on my boat project for the winter because it’s too damn cold. And this is bitter irony because my boat project involved insulating the hull. Only problem is the materials I want to use to not do very well in cold weather. As an experiment I painted the hull inside some of the stowage spaces in the salon. Three days later, they were still wet, even though I was running a heater, blowing directly into the space.

That’s a heater being directed into the painted space.

I used some heat and noise reducing paint called Al’s HNR, which I ordered from Amazon. It’s got those 3M microspheres already mixed in. Yes, I know I can buy a bag of those spheres for 10$ and mix them myself. I’ve got that bag. This is easier in terms of experimenting because I don’t need to protect my lungs in order to use it. If you mix your own, you need to wear a respirator to keep the little microscopic spheres from entering your lung tissue.  If this turned out to be worth it, then I’d mix my own.

Anyhoo, the paint goes on like whipped cream, smooth and silky. But it’s too cold for it to dry. I’m still interested in experimenting with how much of an actual difference it would make, but I’m not interested in surfaces that won’t dry because the weather isn’t warm enough and the hull is 43F, a fact which I know because Mike bought himself a nice little hand held temperature meter and I stole it from him.

See? I’m not making this up. Also I love this thing.

My plan was to paint the hull inside the cabinets with this stuff a couple of times, then use hull liner over that. I got a screaming deal on some very nice fuzzy hull liner at the local foam and fabric place. It will make the interior of these cabinets quiet and hopefully condensation free. It goes on with spray adhesive. It’s probably too cold to use that, too. And, maybe it’s just me, but the idea of using a spray adhesive when I’m using electric heat to keep the cabin warm enough to live in just sounds like a stupid idea.  So this winter project is an epic fail. It will wait.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, we had the gift giving holiday and Mike gave me a nifty one-touch winch handle and a waterproof case for electronics. Sweet! It must be love. 

Want to see what I got him? This.

Finally!

And, in keeping with the decorating theme, I felt like the Man Cave on board Galapagos could use some decor.

Why does this make me laugh hysterically? Now featured above the workbench.

And this for the engine room:

It’s funny, because it’s true!

I know what you must be thinking. “They have that big blue boat they are refitting and THIS is the stuff they get for Christmas?” .  Hey, we can’t all be married to Mark over at Our Life with Ceol Mor; Mark, who bought his wife, Cidnie, brand spanking new Lewmar 55 winches for Christmas. No way. We can’t all be married to him. And that’s just fine I tell you!  Because guess what? We have already purchased our tickets for the boat show later this month and Mike says we are taking our credit card this year! You know what that means? It means Merry Cruising Christmas to us because we are shopping for refrigeration, among other things!  Oh yeah, baby, there are boat projects coming this year.

So we’re saving all our energy for the next big push, which will be this spring before we take off for our 4-5 week (Holy Extended Vacation, Batman!) cruise in July. Mike wants to have another go at the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Until then, we live life in the slow lane. Mike putters. I paint. Here’s a little boat totem I painted for Galapagos. Some people are diesel mechanics. Others are not. Galapagos Totem

 

Exhaust System is a Go!

Posted on by

Finally, after seven weeks of worry, googling and angst, we have our repaired exhaust riser installed in Galapagos.  Here is what we finally ended up with.

Exhaust riser 3.0. Now with more wiggle. Since this photo was taken, I have added an additional brace in the vertical plane.

You will note an eerie similarity to the first riser we had built in Astoria. The only difference is that we have added an eight inch long 2.5 inch wide flexible coupling as close to the exhuast manifold as was possible. The flexible coupling is a bellows type with a smooth liner inside to protect the bellows from exhaust particulates which hopefully will prolong its life.  I opted for a larger flex coupling in the hopes that it will provide some additional strength to the whole unit.  Sizing the coupling up came at the expense of requiring two stainless cones to fit the coupling to the existing pipe.

New Coupling with cones

New Coupling with cones

All of this is a departure from an earlier design that would have increased the diameter of the exhaust to 2 inches right after the manifold and added a flex coupling horizontally instead of vertically. I still like that idea and may design another system using threaded pipe to allow me to build yet another exhaust riser if this proves unreliable.

The design Steve Hulsizer and I came up with. I like the fact that it is sized up to two inches. The flex coupling would have to be fairly small (4 inches long?) to fit in the space available.

So why didn’t I just have the new riser designed like this? Mostly I was talked out of it by the welders who tended to agree that the existing design was actually quite robust in all areas and the only modification needed was the flex coupling to allow for engine movement without stressing the riser.  The existing system is quite beefy and at this point I can only hope they are right. Still I would like to have a new manifold flange made with a 1.5 inch NPT fitting welded on that would allow me to create my own riser using easily acquired stainless fittings and pipe. Broomfields, the local exhaust experts in the Puget Sound,  has a flex coupling with NPT fittings welded on that would be ideal for such a project.

As you may note, I am not done worrying over this part of our engine. Maybe it will just take some time with this layout to begin to feel that this is a safe and robust system. On Saturday, I added an additional brace to the riser and used what fiber glass heat tape I had left to wrap the majority of the pipe. I ran the engine for an hour at a variety of RPMs and everything looked great. In reality the engine moves very little except at dead idle. At 750 RPM, you can see the coupling moving perhaps a quarter of an inch. Since I know the engine moves most in this range, I tend to bump the speed up a bit as soon as I can and the vibration disappears quickly. Still, boats tend to spend a lot of time at idle, especially during docking maneuvers. When docking, I prefer to worry about crashing into expensive boats and would rather not have to split my time worrying over the engine.

Wrapped, braced and tested. I’m not sure how to wrap the flex coupling or if I even should.

Now that we have a functoning engine again, Let’s hope the weather will allow us to get out on the water a few more times. We are well and fully into fall here but we should have a few days here and there that will allow us enjoy a crisp autumn sail.

 

Time Flies

Posted on by

Dang it, we’ve been so focused on researching parts, welders, and magicians for our exhaust elbow that we completely forgot that October is our Anniversary month for Little Cunning Plan. We’ve been at this thing for three years now. Frankly, it’s about as hard to believe as the ages of our kids and the fact that we’ve been married a lifetime. I guess the lesson in that is that if you just start, then put one foot in front of the other, stay focused,  and write about what you love a blog that records the history of your process somehow emerges. Before you know it you have three years, 220 published posts, 2,664 comments, and visitors from 125 countries. Sure, some of those are spam robots, but still. It’s mind boggling.

Happy Halloween. If you are not spider-friendly you should probably stay away from my garden this time of year. Yeah, she is slightly out of focus. I don’t like to get too close.

Looking back at our first post I see how many things have changed in three years and how far we’ve come with ‘the plan’. We no longer have our Cal 34 (although we still miss that boat and the kind of sailing she allowed us around here) and we are deep into the months of refitting S/V Galapagos. We still have a house, and while from the first post it looks like we were of a firm mind to rent out our home when we leave the dock, now we’re not sure about that. Sell? Rent? We still don’t know for sure. I imagine the correct answer will reveal itself.

In spite of the fact that I do most of the writing on this blog, Mike continues to hold the record for the most popular post of all time in the entire universe. But I’m not bitter. I can’t really blame people for being wowed by photos of Orcas in Commencement Bay. That visitation was a stunning example of his ability to communicate directly with his watery brethren. I live in humility; outshone by his dark magic ways. We got 720 hits that day alone. That post was in March 2012.  I will never catch up to that.  Not ever.

We still live here. Enjoy garden photos while you can.

Shortly after beginning this blog, we discovered the concept of comment spam. I am vastly amused by this, especially since we put the security filters in place. Hardly any spam comments get through to the actual blog but it is still entertaining to go into the spam filter and read what robots have to say. Occasionally they come up with some pretty creative phrases that make one think; like this one from today’s batch:

“Make your own art work look like the result of mastication”.

You know, I’d like to meet the robot that came up with that. I’m pretty sure that he’s seen some of my art work and I have a bone to pick with him.

The boat reviews on our website get an incredible number of hits all the time, even though almost or all of those particular boats have been sold. People like to read those reviews and I miss writing them. If I have any regrets about buying Galapagos, it’s that in choosing a boat, the search then has ended. That means people aren’t really that interested in showing us boats anymore. And I really like looking at boats. I learn so much from looking, even if I’m not buying. If you have a boat you’d like me to look at and write up, contact me and we’ll see if we can set something up.

Mike sailing Moonrise during our bittersweet last voyage on a boat that taught us to love sailing.

This past year has been a whirlwind of activity since buying Galapagos back in October 2013. We enjoyed our time in Astoria and still miss our favorite places like Three Cups Coffee and Blue Ocean Thai. But we really do not miss the drive down, and we don’t miss worrying about the boat when the Pacific Coast storms hit that area. She is safer, snugger, in her slip here in Tacoma where we can tend to her, work on her systems, and enjoy her. How did we ever spend our time before we owned a big old sailboat? I guess we just need a project.

Here are a few before and after photos of S/V Galapagos that showcase the progress we’ve made this year. It’s impossible to list all of the projects that have been completed. Refitting a sailboat is such an organic process. One thing leads to another. I’d have to keep a running list to keep track of it. And we are not organized enough for that. These are the big ones.

October 2013’s engine room.

Current version of engine room, more tweaking going on continuously.

Current version of engine room, more tweaking going on continuously.

The salon in 2013.

Salon now.

 

Workbench then.

And workbench now.

 

Anchor locker then.

Anchor locker now.

Aft cabin then.

Aft cabin now.

 

Aft head walls then.

Aft head walls now.

In the coming year we hope to add refrigeration to the boat. We would also like to do some minor remodeling of the aft cabin and the salon. I have not given up on having a settee that is easy for both of us to sit together cuddled up to watch movies and a bed that is wide enough for both of us to sleep comfortably. And, of course, we hope to get to do some sailing, too.