Category Archives: Sailboats

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.

Creeping Towards Victory

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While Melissa was evacuating from her old office and attending the sailing conference, I spent another weekend in Astoria inching ever closer to that happy day when Andromeda is back in the water. We make progress, but slowly.

Since the weather was pretty mild on Saturday, I got to work right away sealing the cockpit sole and screwing it back down. The sole has been sitting loose since John, the previous owner removed the old engine sometime in September. That means that water has had an easy time flowing into the engine room and we had to keep the steering pedestal and other steering hardware down below. Now that the new engine is in, I really wanted to start buttoning up the cockpit. We have enough trouble keeping the boat dry without having the engine room practically open to a rainy Astoria Winter.

My Bear Trap.  This allowed me to apply the butyl tape and then lower the floor down with a minimum of lateral movement.

Melissa bought some grey Butyl Tape from This Guy after reading about its superior quality from Tate and Dani of Sundowner Sails Again. This was my first experience using this tape and I am so far very impressed with its ease of use and tenacity. I did have a bit of a learning curve when it came to applying it though.

Lesson one with butyl tape. Do Not Remove the paper backing until the tape is applied to at least one surface. This stuff is tacky!

I applied slightly overlapping runs of the tape to the cleaned and freshly wiped lip of the the sole.

Two runs of tape, slightly overlapping

For reference, check out our earlier post on getting the cockpit sole cleaned.

Once I had run the tape around the perimeter and gently lowered the sole back down, it was time to screw down the sole and seal the 32 holes that had been originally used. That’s a lot of 1/4 inch screw holes. Assuming 100 Kips of tension as the low end of the range for a quarter inch 304 or 316 stainless screw, clearly we are more concerned with the amount of attachment area between the screw and the fiberglass sole. I opted to screw down on both sides of each corner and once on each side, which comes to twelve attachment points for the sole. The remaining twenty unused holes were filled with epoxy.

Corners and sides are screwed and filled with Life Caulk. The unused holes are filled with epoxy.

I hope I don’t regret using the Life Caulk for the screws. After using the butyl tape, I think it may make a superior seal. It is certainly easier to work with.

We will refinish the sole at a later time. This may be an opportunity to use the Kiwi Grip paint. We will need something that provides a good grip but that won’t trap a lot of dirt. Suggestions anyone?

With the sole finally secured, I was really excited to put the steering pedestal and wheel back in the cockpit. I have knocked the pedestal over three times and am amazed that I haven’t broken the thing as we work around it down below. I had to repaint some of the brackets holding the steering pump and hooking up the rudder hydraulics is still a little ways off, but man it feels good to have an actual wheel back in the cockpit.

Sole and Steering pedestal re-installed

Sole and Steering pedestal re-installed

Since this post is running a bit long, I’ll save the engine alignment for Friday. But I do want to leave you with a final photo of one of Melissa’s projects. We brought home hundreds of pounds of hardware which Melissa meticulously went through and organized. We still have some weird stuff that I need to look at, but the screws, bulbs, O-rings, and a thousand other bits and pieces are now on Andromeda and labeled! Anyone who has ever just thrown up their hands and gone to the Chandlery for yet another bit of stainless steel will appreciate how great it is to have the ability to lay your hand on just the right sized screw for a particular application.

The metal bar with a dog leg is for the engine control cable. Finding the correct screw for the job was easy.

We have several containers like this which are divided by type, (Machine, Wood, Brass etc) The organization is still a work in progress but so far, I have saved hours looking for parts or going to the store to buy something we already have but can’t find. Thanks Baby!