S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

Ticked a few things off the to do list the past few days.

New Years Eve day, Dawn worked on the masts and booms filling all the holes we don't need anymore with Belzona 1111. Thanks to Tom at Seaview for helping us get started. Dawn is really good at these kinds of projects that require being neat and detailed oriented. I'm better at breaking things an making a mess.

The bilge hoses have all been replaced. This took a little longer than planned because I used stiffer hose which added some unforeseen complexity. It also became delayed due to an apparent shortage of 316 SS hose clamps in the size I needed. Fisheries Supply in Seattle is horrible at managing their stock, but their prices are better than West Marine. Included in this a Perko bronze strainer for the manual bilg pump and an inline check-valv on the stern end of the seconday\large bilge pump. I am considering walling off the aft-most section of the bilge to minimize the area which stays wet. We would place the primary pump in that section but if we had more water than that then it flow over the wall and we would kick on the secondary pump. We also need to put a float switch on the primary bilge pump, currently it is only enabled by the breaker switch.

The Walter Machine RV-20 V-Drive has a raw water cooling chamber on the top of it which is prone to corrosion. Eventually it can corrode through allowing sea water to mix with the oil in the bottom half of the v-drive where all the gears are. This would be bad. Several owners have cleaned up the corrosion and used Marine-Tex to protect the area before hooking everything back up. Some owners (including my surveyor who also owns a Pearson 424) have removed the raw water cooling altogether. The corrosion in my unit is so bad that it damaged one of the bolt holes used to attach the top plate to the v-drive so I am going the route of leaving the unit dry. So now instead the raw cooling water going from the strainer to the v-drive and then to the egine it now goes directly from the strainer to the engine. I will install a temperature gauge on the v-drive to monitor it for overheating and I left the hoses in place so I could hook it up back if it ever did overheat. Eventually we will probably replace the v-drive, but that is not something we wanted to do right now.

I have not finished this yet, but the anchor washdown pump was not protected by a strainer. I purchased all the hoses, clamps and the Sherwood strainer. This will get installed completed tomorrow. I would have finished it today, but I forgot to buy the mounting bracket.

I also capped off the vent thru-hull that used to be part of the holding bag system. I will also being putting a plug on the inside portion of the deck fiting for pumping out. I thought about removing and glassing these closed, but I don't this it's neccesary, capping them of is adequate redundance. I also put a plug in the thru-hull I eventually plan to use for the water maker. It has a ball valve, but I like the added security of the plug as well. This is something we'll do just before we plan to leave.

All in all it was nice to tick a few thing off the list, but we still have a ways to go!

The boat has been moved form sitting in the yard where the bottom was prepped and painted, some keel damaged was repaired (oopsy), the v-berth was prepped by me, and the windlass was removed. The boat is now sitting inside the prep tent. I’ve not been to it yet, but I’ll go tomorrow and take a bunch of pictures.

Tom from Seaview gave me a call about some blisters he saw along the waterline. We’re not sure if it’s just a paint issue or if there is some gelcoat damage. We’ll know more when they start to prep for painting. This is one of those “known unknowns” which could be nothing or could be expensive. We’ll find out soon enough.

The yard is prepping the boat for repainting the stripes, and I aguess polishing the hull as well as a bunch of fiberglass projects including closing up some thru-hulls, reinforcing the v-berth and moving the windlass. I also have a lot of chores to do:

• Grind off a thru-hull so it can be pushed in and then glassed closed.
• Remove the teak trim from the deck where the windlass was removed.
• Cleanup the water jacket in the VDrive and sand off the corrosion on the input shaft.
• I have a lot of measuring to do to determine the wire lengths needed for the new electronics and mast lights. I’ll start with just the lengths needed for the masts plus some extra so I can put in terminal blocks or connectors which will allow the masts to be pulled without cutting any wires.
• I also want to work on replacing the hoses below the waterline. I’ll pull the hoses, measure them and pickup new hose from Fisheries or West Marine.
• Dawn is probably going to star on the portholes or at least getting all of the pieces in place to make it happen.

Very busy weekend!!

This weekend I finished installing the starter. Along the way I decided to replace the bonding wire on the starter to the v-drive with tinned wire because the existing wire was corroded. As I was doing this, I also decided to replace the bonding wire from the v-drive to the raw water strainer because it had broken a few months back. Removing the nut on the raw water strainer lead to the strainer breaking.  The strainer (bronze) was bolted to an aluminum bracket with stainless steel screws and it had started to bend at the hanger points. I was planning to replace this fall when I haul out, but turns out I needed to do it today. I put a board on that aluminum bracket and put in a new raw water strainer. All in all it was pretty simple, the new fittings lined up a bit differently, but the new strainer looks great and will provide years of reliable service! I have one more bonding wire to put in, just need a 8 AWG to #10 screw ring terminal to check that one off the list.

I also finished installing the starter this weekend after I painted it and let it dry. It pretty much popped right in, I fastened in all the bolts to the block, put the new bonding wires on and then hooked up the battery cables and starter switch. She started up on the first try and water ran well through the exhaust. Everything is look good!

Finally, I finished our plumbing upgrade as well by putting in a new shower mixer valve and handheld \ wall mount sprayer. The original faucet was a 4” on center individual knobs for hot and cold and had a fitting for the shower nozzle right on the faucet. When I pulled this off the wall I was left with two holes in the whole. I put a Shurflo mixer \ volume control in the bottom hole and a wall mount for the shower nozzle in the top hole. This completes a project I started last summer!

For about two months now we’ve had intermittent luck getting our engine (Westerbeke 58 circa 1981) to start. I at first assumed I had been a batter minder and screwed those up so I did a bunch of tests and they seemed ok. I then started tracing wires and reading up on troubleshooting starting diesel motors in Nigel Calder’s book. That lead the section on bypassing the starter switch and the solenoid itself using a screwdriver. I won’t go into that too much, just to say, its awesome when you do it and a bit scary. ;-) Using that method for the past couple of weeks we’ve been able to get her started. The workaround pointed clearly to a solenoid failure. The plan for repair was to pull the starter and the attached solenoid and either replace them or get them rebuilt.

I started out (no pun intended) by calling up my local Westerbeke dealer Gallery Marine Services and asking them if they did this kind of work. They said “sure we can send it out” and I said can I just contact the place you send them and he totally coughed up Blanchard Auto Electric. I though this was very cool, they could have easily said, “bring it in” and charged me extra. I’ve not done any business with them really but Gallery Marine Services seems like an good place thus far!

I took my starter over to Blanchard Auto Electric and even MORE great service ensued! I walk in and talk to the proverbial guy at the counter. He looks some stuff up in the computer, looks in some books and says well you have two options for a new one. One costs $260 and the other $160 (numbers are approximate recollections) and then goes, go through that door into the shop, follow the yellow line on the floor and ask Todd if the one you have now is worth rebuilding. I go back and see Todd who is very much deep in the shop behind a wall of starter motors of all sizes. The only way he could looked more prophetic would have been had he been chanting incantations over a boiling pot of oil and diesel parts. Todd and I talked about the merits of the $100 price difference and he wanted to tell me to just go ahead and buy the cheaper one, but he knew they had recently changed ownership and wasn’t sure if his past experience would reflect on current quality. So Todd looks at my starter and says let me take a look at tomorrow and I’ll let you know if what you have is worth rebuilding.

I drop my 40lb starter off with Todd and go to work thinking I’d get a call the next morning. Three hours later the same day Todd calls me up and goes, “Well I broke one the corroded bolts on your starter trying to get back open, but I was able to get it apart and the starter is perfectly fine. I put a new solenoid on the starter and you’ll be good to go, come down and pick it up.”

The grand total was like $85 for everything, totally awesome experience with Blanchard Auto Electric.

All I have to do now is knock the rust off of the starter with a wire wheel on my new Bench Grinder (ah toys!), paint it again and reinstall it, that should be finished tonight if not Saturday and we should be back to dependable starting!

Today I got most of the new sound insulation installed on the engine cover. The old soundproofing was flaking and falling off the boards to which it was attached. The new material is a vinyl foam insulation with a silver Mylar finish from Sound Tec NW. The material is about 2" inches thick with two layers of foam sandwiching a rubber sound and vibration barrier material that is 2 pounds per square foot.

Installation was pretty simple. I took the surround to the workshop (more on that later) and made cardboard templates of each side and the lid. Next I traced teh templates onto the material which I cut using a SHARP drywall razor blade held in my hand with a duct taped finger so I could push really hard. This was pretty easy but I have pretty resilient hands. I think someone else might want to find a better way to cut it. Anyway, for me not a problem. The reason the blade was not in a knife was I need to use the full 2” length of the blade.

Next I dry fit everything together in the shop made a few tweaks and then took it to the boat. Once on the boat again I dry fit everything to make sure it all fit. That out of the way I used spray adhesive putting two coats on the wood and the foam before mating the two together. You need to be really carefully when you do that because the glue is very sticky and separating the two would have been very hard if not impossible with out damaging the foam.

Once the glue setup, which was pretty much instantaneously, I took #9 2-1/2” screws and matching fender washers and attached the foam to the wood. Before placing the screws in the foam I drilled them into a candle to wax the screws. This was a tip from Dave the Sound Tec NW guy. This kept the screws from gripping the foam and tearing it. The screws and fender washers went in without a hitch and I put them in just enough to quilt the Mylar and not so much that I went through the boards.

As you can see from the picture above the material looks great and I can’t wait to fire up the engine. There’s one additional picture on Flickr as well where you can see the individual layers of material. You’ll notice in that picture that only 2 of the three sides are installed. That third side would be impinged upon by the hydraulic prop-brake on my engine (right where the dark spot is) so I either need to remove that brake (which I plan to do eventually) or I need to cut out a window in the insulation so the brake has the room it needs. I also need to finish off the edges with the matching 2” Mylar tape, but that it what we call “detail work” and Dawn is better at that than I am.

Dave from Sound Tec NW was very helpful and easy to work with, I would definitely recommend talking to him if you’re looking to do a similar project. I bought a full sheet of the material and the tape for just under $200.