What a change it makes to be carrying out work in daylight and at a reasonable hour of the day . This time i had the help of Jake again for a 4 hour sunday morning work party to hopefully get the fuel tank right out in to the aft cabin hopefully out of the boat all together . First job of the day was to remove the hyd steering pump and the bulkhead it was attached to to make room enough to extract the fuel tank from its hole in the engine room . This as fairly straight forward and 30min later and a little hacking at the tabbing with a angle grinder had this obstacle out of the way . Next came the hard part , Trying to wiggle the tank out through the side of the engine room in to the now opened up space in the aft cabin and then lift it free of the hull on to the bunk frame . There was only 1/4 inch of "wiggle" room to get it under the deck beam after i had to cut a 2inch section out to accommodate the lip of the tank but luckily the plan was a success and within 10 min of pushing and pulling we had the tank sat on the bunk frame ready for the next stage of extraction. Some of you may remember me saying in an earlier post that the tank was one of the first parts of the boat to be fitted at her time of build , This was evident when we realised that the tank was too big to come out of the engine room hatch without removing the entire engine , It was 4 inch too bit to come up the companion way steps from the aft cabin and also 4.5inch too bit to come out o the wheelhouse door . After allot of working out measuring, rethinking and head scratching the plan was set to cut 5 inch of the tank off to enable us to remove the tank inspect the interior and clean out if found to be good . More effort and head scratching came in to play with working out which part to cut off . Originally I wanted to cut the top of the tank off as this was the most corroded section although this would mean i had to cut over 8 inch off to make it small enough to get out of the boat this would of been ok but it would of removed almost 1/2 the tank capacity as the top area was the widest so the decision was made to cut the whole front panel off up to 4,5inch removing only about 1/10th of the capacity and also removing the bent drain pipe and now snapped vent pipe . As there was still some fuel residue in the tank i could not use the trusty angle grinder due to the big risk of fire so we went back to the same method we used with the water tank the jigsaw . Biggest problem was i only had the cheapo leftover pack of blades and we found that these are great to cut with but they were very brittle blades and used the whole pack cutting 3/4 of the first line so we left it there until i can get hold of better blades and got on with other jobs onboard . Deck fillers and solving leaksOn both sides of the wheelhouse there is a section of under deck storage that is always wet . Through this area the deck drains run and the deck fillers are also located along with a few other fittings and it was these that were the cause of the wet . The net job of the day was to work on the starboard side fittings remove and re seal until it came to getting them out . We found that one was fitted over an older filler location and this was filled with filler although badly done this was an area where water was evidently getting under . The other filler was set in to a plywood riser that was badly sealed and not weatherproofed so was soaked and obviously the cause for more ingress . Both of these fittings needed a real good clean up so we blanked the holes with a cheap sealant and some pvc offcuts and the fittings were taken home to be overhauled . One last fitting was a big eye bolt that is for the safety line this was set on a hardwood pad but we found not sealed at all , this will be relocated and a new pad made up . After the jobs were done for the day it was time to remove the last of the rubbish off the boat , Most was the paneling from the engine room , more insulation and the remains of the battery box i cut out on the last visit
Hopefully next weekend we will finally have the tank out and ready to be revamped ??
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorOne family renovating a Colvic Watson and preparing for an epic adventure Archives
April 2018
Categorieshttps://www.facebook.com/hambleys/
|