But first, hurricane season! It's been a fairly active one. The picture shows Igor, Julia and Karl all hard at work to the north of our location. Hurricanes need to be north of N10 deg or south of S10 deg to form, and we're comfortably just a bit below N9 deg in the no-worries belt. Last year, there was a lot of lightning here in the summer, but this summer it's been very non-traumatic for life on a boat (so far). Nice change although when it's sunny and clear, it means sunny and HOT and we've had a bunch of that. OK, so now on to the trabajo, and hot sweaty trabajo at that.Before we left for the states, we pulled our mighty 9.9hp Yamaha power plants to replace their water pumps. We do it every 2 years or so and I wanted to do it before we left so if I had any unexpected problems, we could pick up parts in the USA. Yamaha is a worldwide company, but the motors in our boat are a US model and local dealers rarely stock parts. When I pulled the lower ends off of the motors, the water tubes that carry cooling water from the pumps to the motor were in tatters, completely corroded through. I figured that it was time to repower since we like to cruise some off the path spots. If the water tubes had corroded through, there was probably a lot of other stuff that was going to corrode through. We had already had problems with carburetors and starter solenoids, so we ordered new motors. The new motors come with power tilt. We could have optioned out of the power tilt and pulled them up by hand as has been done for 20 years on this boat, but I decide to live royally and have power tilt. That meant:
new motors
new wiring harness
new controls (for the power tilt switches)
new ignition switches (because nothing ever stays the same)
nacelle extensions (the motors sit in nacelles, little drop down hangers under the boat to hold the outboards. The new motors hang down lower because of the power tilt)
We also needed a new windlass (to pull up the anchor)
And a new bimini ( the canvas covering of the boat which was becoming see-through)
A gas tank cover for the dinghy to keep the sun from rotting out our gas tank
A helm cover to cover the outside instruments and new Yamaha controls when it's raining.
And we needed to rebuild our stove because it was having a hard time getting to 300F and the broiler would only run for a few minutes.
Ah, life in the tropics!
Anyway, before we started taking pictures, I cut our old windlass apart with a hacksaw to get it's corroded corpse off the boat, installed an snappy new elevated fiberglass mounting pedestal and put the new windlass in.
Pami, never the slouch (that I aspire to be), took our old bimini down and made an new one that fits even better than the old one. While we had that project going in the cockpit, I did some un-wiring of the old outboards and a bit of preparation for installing our new ignition switches and controls (since none of the new parts were the same size as the old ones).
I had to cut out some holes bigger and fill in others. It seems easy to fill in a hole or a part of a cut out, but there's a lot of work to make sure that the new patch is flat and well bonded to the old structure. In short, MUCHO TRABAJO! (not that the bimimi wasn't mucho trabajo, but I whine more and Pami's sleeping right now anyway...). The vertical patches on the top of the holes for the ignition switches I did by placing a piece of an old cutting board behind the panel and screwing it to a stick that I placed across the front (not shown). That gave me a flat back surface. Then I wrapped small pieces of cardboard in plastic and poked them up under the stick to where they would just support the patch and keep it from sagging. Then I patched the holes with epoxy and silica and then placed pieces of packing tape over the completed patch to keep it from sagging during cure. Then sand, sand, sand...
The new ignition switches have beeper units on them so that that can squeal like mad if they run out of oil (I guess, I haven't got the motors yet). Anyway, as shipped, the squawkers would protrude in too far and run afoul of the motor controls, so I had to take them off and re-mount them at 90 deg to the original orientation.
The new motor controls were a bit longer in the axis of the boat than the old ones, so I molded a bit of epoxy and silica to provide a flat mounting surface for the new controls. I think it'll also make it less likely to leak water inside the control and instrument housing should the seals for the new controls ever age. More sanding, sanding, sanding...
The filled fiberglass spots meant re-doing the outer gel coat layer. Only a true artist with a lot of pigments can match the old gel coat. I'm no artist and I don't have any pigments (in fact, I never did any fiberglass work before the windlass pedestal), so I tried to choose old gel coat vs. new gel coat lines that wouldn't show the color difference too sharply. Put on 5 layers of gel coat and sand, sand, sand...Re-apply gel coat in the spots where you rubbed through...
Sand, sand sand...
I never got it 100% right, but it looks pretty good and, in fact, better than the area surrounding the new work.
Meanwhile, Pami had contracted with some good friends of ours, Tom and Kathy on Jumbie, to do some canvas work in exchange for some sewing machine parts they muled back from the states for us. We put the new parts in the machine, a Sailrite LSZ1, and proceeded to have nothing but trouble with it. Pami was using Tenara which is a synthetic spend-a-lifetime-in-the-sun thread. It's no picnic to sew with, but the machine got worse and worse. There's an Argentinian sailmaker, Lobo, at the docks here and he helped me improve my sewing machine foo (the Central American non-violent version of Kung Foo). Between Lobo's tutelage and my own bloody stubbornness in not letting the machine get the better of me, we finally got it running again and actually working better than we have ever experienced. I had to lube a lot more spots on the walking foot assembly than I have ever done before. Pictured here is Pami in one of the more trouble free moments of sewing.
I need to mention our friend Aldolfo who does boat cleaning and various jobs here at the marina. He's a local Panamanian who has become a good friend of ours. He's very hard working and honest and has a great sense of humor. He came to us a few days ago after cleaning the bottom of a boat and asked if we had anything to clean out ears, since one of his was plugged with something. I told him he might have a little crab in there (which once happened to me). As it turned out, after pouring some rubbing alcohol into his ear, he shook out a teeny little crab about 1/2 inch across. Life in the tropics, it ain't for sissies!Next up was nacelle extensions. A nacelle is a fancy word for something that hangs off of a craft to hold an engine. Cap'n Kirk's Enterprise had 'em and we've got 'em too. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacelle
OK, Kirk had Ion Drives and the like, and we've got Yamaha 9.9's but our nacelles aren't a bit less cool than Kirks. The new motors have a power tilt unit that hangs down lower than the clamp on the old motor and will, in fact, drag in the water. We could just bolt them up and let them hang down, but that would be a disgrace to the nacelle-builders art. And so we decided to make extensions that would make the water flow a bit smoother and help deflect any floating debris we might come across at night (or an un-watchful moment) away from the power tilt unit.
I decided (no culpability for Pami here...) to make up a mock up plug out of plywood, fiberglass and putty and then make a mold from that. Once I had the mold, I could easily lay up a couple of extensions and bolt them to the old nacelles. Such a wonderful concept and a beautiful dream.
I made up a mock up of the extension I wanted, providing protection for the motor clamp and the power tilt motor that hangs down on the Starboard side.I then placed the mock up on one of the old nacelles that Pami and I removed from the boat and put a couple of tape patches along either side. I waxed the old nacelle and then hot melt glued little strips of plywood along either side. This made a crude mock up of the nacelle extension I wanted as well as a flange along either side that I could use to bolt the new extension onto the old nacelle. In this way, if I or someone down the line decide to go back to non-power tilt motors, the extensions could be removed.
I then resin coated the structure, cured it overnight, popped it off the old nacelle, puttied in some low spots, sanded it out smooth (but not smooth enough) and put it back on the nacelle in preparation for forming a mold over my wooden plug. Once I had the mold, I could easily make a couple of 'production' extensions, right?
But first, Pami got going on the stove. There isn't a lot of fine dining in Central America and particularly not in the remote areas we often frequent (when not busting our humps working on the boat). So cooking has become a passion. Our two burner stove with oven and broiler has worked wonderfully for us, but the oven max temp has been declining for some time and our broiler element has cracked and it'd only work for a few minutes before flaming out. Pami had ordered a new broiler, but it had been languishing in the to-be-done pile for some time. Seen here is Pami taking the stove out to work on it just after I said 'say hi to Mom!".
Once we got into the project, it became clear that the new broiler was a new, improved, and slightly bigger unit than the old one which took a lot of dremel work to fit into the old stove. I spared Pami any unflattering shots of her contorting herself into awkward spots to grind on the stove, but she got one of me lying on the floor, sweating profusely and elongating the mounting holes in the new broiler. I almost look like I'm in a mood...We've got the broiler working again and the oven will almost hit 400F on just the oven burner, up from the 300F that it had fallen to. We're still not done, but momentarily have it all put back together.
Meanwhile, back at the fiberglass works, we coated our plug with about 4 layers of double thickness chopped mat, cured it overnight and then went to pop the mold off of the plug.No pop.
Not even close.
We hadn't adequately sealed the bondo style putty and the wooden parts of the plug. We had to chisel the wooden plug out of the new mold. It was an all day project and a bit demoralizing. I couldn't resist the melodrama of getting a picture of me chipping away after I had scratched open my arm with the chisel. Oh well, every day has a quitting time.
The next morning, while I was researching fiberglass techniques on the internet, Pami cleaned up the insides of the mold and then we applied some resin to fill in some tight corners and numerous blemishes. After curing, we cleaned up the insides with the die grinder (every boat has a die grinder, right?) and then started sanding, sanding, sanding.Stay tuned to see the end of our projects, the installation of our new motors, maybe a day at the beach, and off to San Blas again.
