Many Projects

This weekend was pretty busy. It started out rainy with some lightning/thunder. Not long after I did some videos around Rhapsody, the sky cleared up, the sun came out and it was HOT. Still, I pressed on getting some work done around the boat.


Last weekend, I went to the local West Marine that's about an hour away to pick up a few things. One of those things were a couple LED lights. I only bought two because that's all they had that would work. The first thing I did when I got to the boat was to put them in.

These lights are nice and bright. At first I put only one bulb in the overhead but put both I bought and reattached the glass cover. What's really nice is these lights don't heat up nearly as much as the halogen that were used before.

I worked on replacing the bilge pump. The pump was mounted at the bottom of this stick.

I took the pump apart to get screws to mount it and also put new connectors on the wires.

Just before lowered the pump back into the bilge, I used this net I found at a pet store to fish out debris that was floating on top of some of the water that is still in the bilge.

There was quite a bit of stuff floating.

I replaced the bilge pump. I'm considering replacement of the hose because it's a bit too stiff. As I put the pump back into the bilge, the stiff hose pulled it a bit sideways.

I took the remains of the old depth sounder out. I cut much of the cable along the route for ease of removal. I found out that it was connected to the Signav unit in the cockpit.

The new one, that was mounted by a previous owner, has a cable that allowed connection to the Garmin GPS. Here, I was working on routing the cable. It went through the bilges, into the engine compartment and out to an area behind the electrical panel in the quarterberth to the GPS.

After routing the cable, I returned the cushion to the quarterberth.

Next, I wanted to work on the stuffing box. I first had to remove everything from the aft storage compartment.

Empty.

Everything sitting on deck.

It was a tight fit but I was able to fit down in there sitting down. Not much room to move around either.

Not sure what this panel is for but there's a shelf in there and a hole for chain locker for the stern anchor.

I also found this contraption called "The Cold Machine". Possibly an Air conditioner?

I also found this shelf just below the Cold Machine.

Here is the stuffing box.

I tried getting the wrenches around the nuts but kept sliding off. Eventually, the nuts did loosen off.

After getting the nut loose with the packing, I looked things over and this is about where I'm at. I'm not quite sure where to go from here. I was thinking to take the nut off the shaft to see and replace the flax packing material but  again, trying to figure out where to go from here.