25 February 2008

Goodbye Mr Perkins

Well, finally got a friend to help direct the hiab and we removed the engine. It came out very easily, even with the gearbox still on. I have sold it to a friend who has a Peterson 44 with a dodgy motor.



Below the engine was a foetid mixture that would probably resemble the time long ago when life began. I have bailed out about 20 litres of stinking black stuff. I am looking forward to having this area cleaned out and newly painted.



The saloon floor came out with a little struggle and exposed the 2 "stainless steel" water tanks. It was hardly "stainless" and full of holes, someone had attempted to patch it with fiberglass. It was quite a job to pull these out of the walkway hatch by myself!



So, the next stage is to clean up a little!

09 February 2008

Engine room work

Removal of the floor has started. I am leaving the bearers until the boatbuilder advises I can remove them - something has got to hold some shape together!



I have removed the generator and the main engine is now ready to be pulled out this week. I needed to remove the generator before I could access the shaft coupling, which was firmly rusted in after 30 years of neglect. It took a long time to remove two of the bolts, lots of cursing the designers of the thing as there was not enough access for a socket or ring spanner, and the bolts are some weird size so my metric or imperial open-end spanners were not a perfect fit. So after two of the four bolts rounded off I was forced to grind the bolt heads off, finishing that process with my Dremel tool. Engine mounts were next, I managed to unbolt either the main top bolt or the lag screws into the bearers. Thankfully I can say that I don't believe there is too much more serious un-engineering to do!



I have now pulled most of the wiring from the boat, there are only a few wires to the aft cabin still in place. What do you do with old wires, is there any value in the copper?


I am not spending any time with the engine, I have not even removed the new oil hosework which we added in Hawaii (at great expense and trouble!).