Tight Spaces

Working on a sailboat isn’t that hard; you only need to know about DC circuits, AC circuits, diesel engines, gas engines, propane systems, plumbing, sewage, carpentry, fiberglass, running rigging, and standing rigging. Between books and the internet, most anything you run into will be covered, so even if you aren’t familiar with a system, it’s not that difficult. The hard part is getting into the places you need to reach these systems. The following pictures are some of the gymnastics I’ve needed to perform to complete some tasks.

Changing a raw water impeller is a task that needs to be done at least once a year. In order to get to it on our boat you need to go through a few steps.

 

This is what it looks like when you begin.

 

First you need to remove the steps leading to the cockpit.

 

Then you need to remove the cover over the engine.

   

Next remove the front and left sides. They’re one big piece.

Finally, you can remove the right side piece and you are ready to start working.

 All set to go. 

The raw water impeller is conveniently located right at the front of the engine. Unfortunately, the engine is placed in the boat backwards, so you have to crawl over the engine and work on everything backwards.

 

The raw water pump pulls sea water into the engine to cool it off while it is running. The impeller is the rubber fan that pushes the water through the pump. If the impeller breaks the engine will overheat, so if water stops flowing through the engine you need to shut it down immediately and go through all these steps before starting it back up again. For that reason, we’ll change out the impeller on a regular basis, so that it never breaks. I don’t want to do this while the engine is hot, in waves, while entering a channel.

Our boat has a propane sniffer and they last for years, but they don’t last forever. Ours died and needed to be replaced. The panel for the sniffer is next to the stove, but the sniffer is located under the stove where gas is most likely to leak. The wire runs through a big cabinet, under the oven enclosure then back up to the bottom of the stove/oven.

In order to route the wire I needed to get my upper body into the cabinet and do all the work while upside down, with a flashlight. It looked something like this from the outside.

The problem here was that my shoulders were about the same width as the hole I had to climb into and there wasn’t a good place to get leverage to push myself out. This picture is actually my second time in the hole and you can see that I kept my right arm out. That made it more difficult because I had to do everything with one hand, but the alternative was worse. The second time, Wendy was there to take a picture and call for help if I needed it. The first time I went down there to remove the old wire, I was alone on the boat and had both arms in the hole. When it came time to get out I realized there was no good way to remove myself. For just a moment I started to panic then I took a deep breath, slowed down and started moving my hands around to try to find a place to push myself up. The area was too small to move both arms, so I moved one arm out of the way then moved the other around. Once I found a place to push off with my right hand I moved it out of the way and tried to find a place for my left hand. Finally, I managed to get both hands in a position where I could push myself up and out. It took three or four minutes that felt like an hour. I made sure Wendy was around the second time and kept an arm out.

 Most recently, we installed a fuel polisher for our diesel fuel. It is a system with two filters, a fuel pump and a pressure gauge. To clean water and debris from the fuel you flip some levers, turn on the pump and run the fuel through the filter number 1, when that filter gets too dirty an alarm goes off and you switch to filter number 2, change filter number 1 then switch back. The second filter also works as a backup while running the engine. If the first one clogs, you just switch over until you can change the first filter then switch back. It’s a great system and we had an ideal place to install it in a cockpit locker. As usual, the problem was one of access. In order to install the polisher I had to climb into the cockpit locker and lay on top of our battery bank. That looked like this.

 Here is the locker.

 This is me inside the locker, working on the top part of the installation.

And this is me working on the lower part of the installation. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic.

None of these jobs where fun, but at least we got them complete while we were sitting still in a marina. They would have been a whole lot more interesting if we did any of this work while anchored out or while sailing.

 

That’s all for now. Hope everyone had a great Christmas and has an awesome New Year!

We're ALIVE!!!!

It’s been a while since my last post, so what’s been going on? Last time I posted we were steadily working towards completing our boat project list and planning to set sail in Oct. That didn’t happen. We moved our date to Thanksgiving and that didn’t happen either. Then we picked Jan 2015 and now that date has been pushed back. At this point, it looks like mid-Feb 2015 – for now.

This reason for this is the chip that ate my summer. In April, I was asked to be lead designer for a mixed signal design. This was sort of a big deal for me. I usually work alone. I can work from anywhere and set my own schedule. That’s the way I like it. This project involved about 20 people and I really needed to be in CA to work with other designers and to manage everything, so I spent my summer living in a hotel room in Silicon Valley. From The beginning of May to the beginning of Sept I was on our boat a total of 2 weeks. While in CA I worked 12+ hour days, 7 days a week. I missed the opportunity to dive with some friends and to teach my nephews to dive. It was rough summer. I was finally able to leave because Wendy was having foot surgery. When I returned to FL I kept the same schedule, but at least I was home. Even though I was finally home, I was working way too much and was wiped out. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or do anything more than I had to. I certainly didn’t feel like writing. On top of that, I had gained about 10 pounds and lost some muscle. This project kicked my butt.

This is the chip that ate my summer. It probably won't mean much to most people, but it is an instrumentation amp with 16 digitally selected differential input pairs, 8 diffrent gain stages, a 10 bit DAC to correct offset and a 3V LDO supply with a total of 40 pins. The whole die is that little black square in the center of the chip. The squiggly things are the wire going from the die to the pins.

We were able to do some work on the boat in Oct and Nov, but we were way behind. Thanksgiving helped a lot. I took off the whole week (except I worked part of a couple of days anyway) and we were able to get a lot of tasks checked off the list. Some may have noticed Wendy’s post after I installed the new stove/oven; we also installed new port windows and a fuel polisher, plus I redid the bilge pump and sump pump. In addition, there were some smaller items we completed and we hired some professionals to take care of some things.

So, here is what has happened since I last posted:

We attended two weddings – one in Austin and one in Kona, HI (congratulations Sara and Delaney and Kayla and Chris). I spent most of the summer in CA, plus two weeks in CO for work. Wendy had foot surgery in August and we lived with my parents for a few weeks, since Wendy couldn’t get on and off the boat. We installed a new stove/oven, new opening port windows, a fuel polisher, some led lights, an amplified wifi antennae, a new bilge pump and sump pump, a new propane sniffer and a new anchor. On top of that we had someone help us with a diesel leak and a broken alternator and hired someone to replace our dodger and bimini. Plus regular maintenance/cleaning on the boat. In addition, we move parts from bins into storage spaces on the boat and got rid of things from storage. Next week we’ll head to Dallas for Christmas and to Chicago for a wedding on New Year’s Eve (congrats Lisa and Paul) – hopefully we don’t freeze. Whew, quite a year.

Wendy’s foot is doing much better now and she is back to walking with a little running and walking dogs. Speaking of dogs, the guy who threw the dog ended up with a plea deal – 30 days in jail and paying for all the bills associated with his actions. His lawyer said he wanted to go to trial and he wouldn’t accept a deal that included jail time, but there was video of the whole incident and people lined up to testify, so the day before the trial he accepted a deal. Wendy was happy; the guy ended up in jail and she didn’t have to relive the whole thing in court. I’m working out regularly and have lost all the weight I gain over the summer. I feel like a human again and actually interact with people now.

Wendy had an endoscopy in Nov and they want to do a second one in Jan with a follow up the first week of Feb. That sets our schedule to leave around mid-Feb. Not a big deal, but it is pushing our date out even further. I went to the dentist and he said all of my old mercury fillings were corroding and starting to crack my teeth. He suggested drilling them all out and capping most of the teeth, so I get five dentist appointments in Dec, seven crowns and one inlay. Hooray!?

This winter has already been colder than last winter. With the weather, we wish we were in the Bahamas now, but we’ll be there soon. I’ll post more details about all the things we’ve done shortly. 

Just wanted to let everyone know we are still alive.

Merry Christmas! Or Happy Holidays or whatever you like. Enjoy your time off with family and friends.

Stanchions

As long as we had all the all of our cabinetry taken apart to install new chainplates it seemed like a good time to re-bed all of our stanchions.  Stanchions are the posts that hold up the lifelines.  The lifelines are cables that run around the deck to help keep people on the boat.  Unfortunately, they are about two feet high, which is a great height to trip people overboard, so mostly you just hang on to something as you move around on deck and hope that you don’t need the lifelines to keep you where you belong.  However, if the worst happens and you do need the lifelines, you’ll want them to remain attached to the boat.

Anyway, ours had not been re-caulked in the 33 years since they were installed and some of them were leaking.  None of the leaks were bad, but leaks lead to mold and that’s not welcome on our boat.  There was also the same issue we had where the mast passed through the deck.  Water was getting into the deck core and weakening the deck around the stanchion deck plates.  We could see this on the deck as there were cracks in the gelcoat surrounding the stanchions.  Gelcoat is like paint for boats.  The fiberglass is more flexible than the gelcoat, especially when the core gets wet, so it flexes, the gelcoat can’t flex as much, so it cracks.  Around some of the stanchion bases we could see cracks in the gelcoat, so we knew that the core was wet.  The area that was wet was fairly large and would require more than just a few small holes in the deck to remove the damaged core.

There are a couple of ways to fix this problem; the first is to strip the fiberglass off the deck to expose the entire wet core.  Once exposed, the wet core is removed, the deck is glassed back over then gelcoat is painted on top and non-skid is added to match the rest of the deck.  Then there is the easy way which is the option we chose.  The bases of the stanchions are about 4x5 inches, so we would remove a base then take a 3” hole saw and cut a 3” hole under the base where it would later be hidden.  We then used an allen wrench stuck into a drill to clean out the wet core between the deck.  Between the allen wrench, a pick, a long screwdriver and a vacuum we cleaned out all the wet core in the deck without removing any of the fiberglass or non-skid.  We did have a 3” hole in the deck, but that would later be covered with the stanchion base.

We used a hole saw to cut a 3" hole in the deck beneath the stanchion base.

All the wet wood was removed until there was only clean fiberglass left.

 

Once the hole was cleaned out we had five small holes passing all the way through the deck.  These were four bolt hole and a small guide hole from the hole saw.  Typically, to fill the holes we would apply a strong tape under the holes from inside the boat.  While doing our chainplates we used this method with marginal success.  We ended up with a lot of resin running into the cabinets and very little staying in the holes.  So, we came up with a better solution when it came time to fill the holes in the deck.  While typical fiberglass resin is very thin, there are thicker, quicker setting resins.  We put some very thick resin in to cover up the small holes that went all the way through the deck just to seal up the holes.  We let that dry for 24 hours then we went back and filled the rest of the 3” hole with glass mat and thin resin.  With this method, no resin ran into the inside of the boat.  It took an extra day, but it saved a lot of mess and headaches.  Since the decks are sloped we added tape to the lower sections of the whole, so that we could fill the hole all the way to the top.  After another 24 hours the resin was dry and ready to be drilled.

This is where a stanchion base was removed, a 3" hole cut out, all the wet wood removed then the whole thing filled with fiberglass mat and resin.

 

 

 

We waited until we had a couple of nice days then finished the job.  Since the holes were now filled with fiberglass they had to be drilled out.  Then we had to make sure the backing plate lined up with the new holes or re-drill that, too.  We countersunk the holes to give the sealant a little extra depth around the bolts and we were finally ready to reassemble the stanchions.  We covered the area under the stanchion base with a UV resistant caulk and filled the newly drilled holes with the caulk.  We placed the stanchion base in place and pushed the bolts through the deck.  Wendy held each bolt in place with a screw driver while I went below to place washers and nyloc nuts on the bolts.  We tightened the nuts, cleaned up the caulk and we were finished.  After letting the caulk dry for another 24 hours we sprayed water on the stanchions to make sure there were no leaks.  There were no leaks – Success!

 

The bolts holes are drilled.



The bolt holes are counter sunk to give a little more room for caulk.

 

The caulk is added.  We used 3M 4200 caulk as it is UV resistant.

 

 

We have completed the port side stanchions and it took about 2 weeks of spare time.  Now we need to complete the starboard side, but only one of those is leaking and very minimally, so we are not in a big hurry to do those.  We have some other things that are a little more urgent that we’ll take care of first.

Stanchion re-installed.  Not a good job with the caulk, I should have put some tape around the base to make it more clean.  Oh, well, we still have the starboard side so I can perfect my technique.