Steel Rails and Instrumentation Work

I showed up at the workshop at 8.30 AM yesterday (Saturday) to measure the clearance between the flywheel and the aft engine supports and found Neil and Joel taking direct measurements from the engine.

[First photo  shows Neil  at left discussing  the measurements with Joel.  The engine support  angle steel is in the foreground.]

It turned out to be a very productive session. There was agreement that the insides of the engine beds need to be built up.  Neil also pointed out that the insides of the beds slant in, meaning that the square angle steel would not have fit snugly on both sides.  I passed on Mark's message about the front supports having been set up differently from the rear ones and Joel had already spotted that and explained why it was done. Neil identified the cause of the discrepancy of the measurements between the supports on each side of the engine as the fact that two of the supports are adjustable on the fore-aft direction and they were set at different positions in the slot

Joel showed me the new steel engine supports which are 32" long of 3/8" steel with 4" per side.  Boy, did they look strong in real life.  I've got no doubt that they will support that 400 lb engine with no problem.

I left that session confident that all three of us have good insight into the fitting issues and that I no longer need to worry a major problem due to a misunderstanding.

At the boat Joel fitted the steel supports on the wooden engine beds then placed the jig onto the supports to see how this abbreviated mockup of the engine would interface with the propeller shaft.  He was extremely pleased with what he saw.  To us it appeared that the representation of the center of the coupler on the jig was perfectly centered on the shaft coupler and at the same angle as the shaft.  I was amazed that they had managed to get so close on the first cut.

Joel had confirmed that the there was an inaccuracy in the distance between the engine supports on the jig.  We looked at the drawings for the distance between the coupler and the center of the rear supports but they were not provided, which surprised me because that is such an important measurement.  Joel went to the shop to measure the engine directly to determine whether it was the front or the rear support locations on the jig that were incorrect.  (The rear ones were wrong.)

Joel and indicated that on Monday I could expect either Mercedes or a fiberglass  man to build up the engine beds.

Now that I had the run of the boat to myself I began work on removing the old SABB instrumentation from the cockpit.  Six wires passed from the instruments back into the lazarette then into conduit up the port side of the boat into the main electrical panel area.  I decided to leave  these wires in place because they might be useful one day for perhaps cockpit lights.  I tied them off neatly at each end of the conduit and labelled them.

This left several holes where the instruments had been so I played around with several possibilities on what to fill in and what instruments to place where.  Neil had given me a never-used Yanmar plate that had one hole the perfect size for  the tachometer and two holes that would  have to be reamed out to accommodate the volt and temperature meters.  But this leave some smaller holes and a set of lights that I would not require so decided it best that I start afresh.

Back in the main switch compartment I put in more time trying to find the wire that was supposed to connect the switch panels to the negative bus bar.  Hard as I tried I could find no such wire, nor any wire that had been parted.  However, I did discover that the negative bars of the two panels are wired in common. I sat there frustrated: How could I solve the switch panel grounding problem if I couldn't find the ground wire?  Then came like a Zen koan the question "What was there before there were bus bars?"  Then I realized that the two bus bars had been installed in New Zealand so the switch panels must have been grounded either directly to the batteries or perhaps through the engine in some way.  At that point I quit worrying about why the grounding to the panels had stopped and decided to simply install a new grounding to the negative bus bar.

During the afternoon while Brenda was making a short visit to the boat a couple passed by and the woman said G'Day.  "Are you Australian?" I asked.  It was Ib and Yadranka Svane, lately from Port Lincoln S.A.  They had flown over an recently purchased a Hans Christian 38, Aeolus, built in about 1985.  They had repowered the boat in Mazatlan and had motored over to put some hours on their new Yanmar engine.

On the way they had heard a distress call, realized that they were close to the stricken boat, and helped save Mike's Falmouth Cutter 22'.  Two days before he had begun taking serious water around his shaft packing and could not staunch the water.  He had been pumping the bailing for over two days and finally issued a Mayday. Aeolus  was soon on the scene and Ib rigged up an electric pump with hosing. A tanker came by then a Mexican Navy boat who put a man on board to help him connect the pump.  Then Ib suggested that  he disconnect his engine raw water inlet hose and let the engine suck its cooling water from the bilge.  That helped a lot.  Then they followed Mike into La Paz all night and into the next afternoon watching his erratic course because he was barely coherent with fatigue.  But he made it and his boat is now at the Abaroa boat yard.

This morning  I ran  into Bob Carroll whom I hadn't seen for over a week and he paid a visit to Pachuca to see the work that has been done.  He gave me the idea of sinking the cockpit instruments into the quarterberth area with a slight upward tilt.  I'll see if I can get someone to build a box that can be set into the side of the seat and hold the instruments at the prescribed angle.  The box would have a see-through cover that could be lifted up to work the instruments.  This afternoon I drew up the plans for such a box.

In the evening Brenda and I visited Aeolus for drinks with Ib and Yadranka.  As luck would have it Mike was there.  He had made a great recovery from his ordeal and did not look his 75 years of age.  Mike is ex-US Marines and the boat is all  that he's got.  He told us that he seriously considered going down with the ship because he felt that without his boat he had nothing.  When Aeolus arrived he was losing the water battle and hanging on by a thread.  But it was a happy ending and great karma for Ib, Yadranka, and Aeolus.