Thursday, December 25, 2014

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!

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