Finishing the Tank

Here's the latest update.

In total, I painted three coats of 2-part epoxy paint alternating between white and grey so I could make sure I had good coverage with each coat. Last week, I painted on a sealer/liner by KBS Coatings that takes 4 days to fully cure. No problem since I visit the boat once a week. Looking at the tank yesterday (16 Jun), I'm happy to report the sealer worked out really nice and is a very hard surface inside the tank. Even has a bit of a gloss look to it too.

In the meantime, I've been working to drill and tap one of the inspection plates for the fittings to feed fuel to the engine and the return. I still need to install a fitting for the vent but need to make sure I measure what I need first.

The only other thing I need to do is also install a fill port and this project will finally be done. It has taken a little more than a year to work on this one project, mainly because of only being able to visit once a week. While there have been some very frustrating moments during this project, I'm very happy now that this project is coming to an end. Soon, the engine will be back on board and other tasks will be completed in order to get the boat ready.

I shot this video to show the interior with the sealer/liner painted on and how hard the material is.

Here's a picture of how the tank looks today. Inspection plates with fittings installed, minus the fill port.

I know this is a very crazy idea to have built a fuel tank out of fiberglass and I know of only one other NS27 owner who did it. Now, the real test will come once the last pieces come together and fuel is poured into it.

Mast Hardware Removed

A video update this time. I removed the rest of the mast hardware today, except for a couple things. Those will be easy to remove, which is seen in the video.

The mast is currently painted so I'll sand it down to bare metal and then it'll be ready to send off to a shop for a paint job.

In other non-boat related news...

The last few days have been a bit...         Interesting.

Woke up last Saturday morning to the sound of pounding at the front door. Opened the door to be greeted by three police officers asking me about my truck. Turns out, there was a hit and run some time during the night. Front driver side bumper was smashed in. Part of the bumper pressed into the tire too and not able to be driven. My truck was hit hard enough, there was skid marks from the tires two feet long.

most of the debris was from the other vehicle

Funny thing, to me at least, the other car didn't "run" very far. Just up the road a bit, still within sight of the truck, also parked on the side road by the neighborhood, it was obvious who did it. Front driver side front end smashed in, airbag deployed, bumper falling off, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

It's nice having a good strong truck. Insurance is taking care of my truck and it has already been towed off to the body shop for repairs.

Spring Launch

I'm still here!


I've been busy on some things around Rhapsody. I have been taking hardware off the mast and looking over its condition as I get things ready. While I like being able to do as much as I can myself, I'm starting to think it might be worth reaching out for help along the way. I'm looking to hire out some work with the mast, and getting the bottom sanded down by the boat yard in preparation for fixing some things and then applying the barrier coat and bottom paint. I'll at least talk with a shop and the yard to see what might happen. In order to work on the bottom, I'm thinking to have the boat moved from the trailer to boat stands as it would be easier to work around. In the following pictures, you can see where some of the old repairs had failed. Some of these low spots need to be filled and sanded.

down to the fiberglass

In the meantime, I've been working on my crazy idea with the fuel tank. It's a lot of work and getting closer to getting completed, although no idea when that will come. I've had a couple bad colds lately that prevented me from wearing a respirator mask so work slowed down a bit. I do have a blog post ready and waiting for additional updates and will be posted when the tank is completed. Once the tank is ready, fittings installed, then I'll be able to reinstall the engine, new muffler, seacocks, hoses, and reinstall the shaft and propeller.


I haven't used the dodger that came with the boat. Apparently, the little box of miscellaneous parts on the boat didn't have the bolts needed to attach even the frame. So, I got what I needed for the frame and have that ready for later. I also laid out the dodger to see what pieces I have. I didn't realize it before, but it seems there's enough pieces for the cockpit to be mostly covered, except the stern rail area. I'd like to change all the canvas to Sunbrella Linen color but what I have will work for now. Changing canvas can wait until the boat is already in the water.

While there's a lot of work left, I'm currently planning to launch Rhapsody in the Spring. I expect the refit to continue throughout winter like before and keep working on what I can until then. Hopefully it'll all work out in the end.

Looking forward to getting out on the water again.

Slow Work Day

Slow day this weekend. Not a whole lot of work on the boat. I spent more time chatting with a couple other guys who are about to head out on their boats down the ICW to Florida. Not really with the snow bird crowds but moving there.

I did some measuring of hoses to see what I may need. The cockpit drains have a white plastic hose that I'm thinking to replace with rubber wet exhaust hose. My reason is that the hose clamps can get better compression onto the seacocks. Speaking of which, I found out one of the seacocks has worked loose due to the wood backing plate getting soft. Good thing they're getting replaced anyway. The only other work I did was to drill out a couple small holes on the deck that had failed patches and filled them in with thickened epoxy. I also had a quick look at placement of the access ports for the water tanks.

Safe travels to all these coming weeks.

Chainplates Are On

Had some rain a couple weeks ago and saw water was finding its way into the boat. In order to stop the leaks, I put the new chainplates on the boat over the last couple weekends.

 Looking at the hull, I may have to wet sand it down and wax it.

On to the next project(s)...

Engine Preparations

Oct 2 2015.

 

Rain, wind and more rain. Still, a good day to be on the boat. Bad thing, is finding more leaks because of the rain, but in a way, still a good thing to try stopping them.

 

I started getting the engine ready to move out of of the way so I can get to the fuel tank under it. I was able to undo three of the bolts holding the engine to the motor mounts. Those things wanted to hold on tight. The one bolt I wasn't able to loosen/remove was directly under the exhaust hose. Still, I removed the alternator and air filter and raw water filter to have more room to reach around the engine. Worst part of taking those off happened to be finding oil covering the air filter. I don't think it's necessarily from an oil leak in the engine itself. I'm thinking it may have been from the oil leak from the failed valve cover gasket I already replaced. Something else for me to keep an eye on later just to be sure.

 

Removing the alternator really helped to see more around the sides and just how much the engine has started to rust. It was looking pretty good until last winter when water hit the the engine due to snow covering the cockpit drains. Doesn't seem to be worsening lately so I have some cleaning up to do. I have a wire brush I can clean some of the parts with. I intend to replace the raw water hoses. I know they're filled with deposits and fresh hoses will help keep the lines clear. Thermostat is pretty green and may replace that too. I'll get a better look at things as I continue to disassemble everything. I was given some advice to find a "rust converter" spray, then just spray paint it. Going to look into options available. I'm also interested in upgrading the standard Hitachi alternator that came with the engine with something larger since I intend to increase the battery capacity.

 

When I took some wires off the alternator, I saw other wires around the engine and disconnected them too. Once I disconnected a couple plugs behind the engine, I realized the wires I disconnected on the front of the engine were part of a bundle attached to it. So I just created more work for myself than I should have.

 

I need to remove the prop and shaft. I was looking online at how others do it and apparently a puller is needed but those things are expensive. I'm going to see if I can find a place that can rent one out or see where I can borrow one. While the shaft is out, I may have to replace the cutlass bearing too so that's another piece I will need to figure out. I will need to replace the hose to the stuffing box. I was going to measure what's on the boat now but forgot about it. Still, no hurry since there's plenty of other things to work on.

 

Lastly, I sorted out the new chainplates to hopefully install soon, and still need to figure out where I put the new bolts for them too. I'd like to first paint a couple more coats on the red stripe by the toe rails.

 

View of the cutlass bearing

wire below oil filter was disconnected, but could have stayed

oily air filter, will be replaced.

two white plugs were all that needed disconnected for the wires.

getting a view of wire connections behind the alternator

View without the alternator or the air filter

Another view.



chainplates layed out

Home Sweet Home

Rhapsody now has a new home.

I got up and left the house around 7:30 this morning. Just in time for rush hour traffic. I knew that but didn't want to wait half the day for traffic to clear out. Still, it took a little more than an hour and a half.

I got to Deale, Maryland and talked with the owner of Rockhold Creek Marina, Jon. Jon showed me around and they had some space where I could put the boat/trailer.

I first backed it up into an open spot in the yard. Then they brought a small tractor around to put it in place. So, at the moment, this is Rhapsody's new home while I work on her and get her ready to go sailing again.

Backing into place

Unhooking from the tractor

Home Sweet Home

View into the rest of the yard

 On another good note, the replacement wheel studs came in today so I should be able to get those on the trailer during the next visit.

70 MPH to Windward

Nice long weekend for Labor Day.

I decided to go get my boat. I drove to Clarksville Tennessee, cleaned up and put away everything in the boat and drove back to northern Virginia all in two and a half days.

Thurday (Sep 3rd): Drove 700 miles to Tennessee. (11 hour drive)

Friday: had breakfast, checked out of the hotel my wife and I stayed at and went to get the boat ready for the trip.

Checking Tires

Wrapping Mast

Wife: "Where is the mast held up at?" Me: "up there."

Cleaned Up / Organized For The Trip

We went to the scales at a local truck stop to weigh everything. The truck, boat/trailer came out to 19,520 lbs. We hit the road around 1:30pm (CST). I wanted to drive past Nashville to get away from the city and get to a rest area East of the city to look things over. 1.5 hour drive, I stopped to check things out. I found out two lug bolts on the front right wheel and sheared off.

The trailer wheels have 6 lug bolts. The middle and rear axles have surge breaks but the wheel with the broken lugs doesn't have anything else on it.

I made sure the lug nuts were tightened all around and drove for another hour and a half to look things over again. No changes. By now, I was almost at Knoxville, TN. Decided to drive and see how far we would get. By the way, the road conditions on I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville was not pleasant at all. Things improved a lot once we got to I-81.

We got up to around Roanoke, VA by the time we stopped. Towing the boat used up a lot more fuel than I would have thought but understandable since the engine needs to work harder to pull all that weight. Stopped at another hotel for the night that thankfully had space to park the trailer without any issues. As I was looking things over on the boat, a guy stopped by and we chatted for a few minutes. He complimented on how nice the boat looked and talked about his time sailing out of San Francisco.

Saturday morning was a late start. But, we drove the rest of the way without any issues and got to the house around 2:30pm (EST).

So looking at Pacific Trailers website, it seems they do have parts for replacing the lug bolts. Which is good, because I was starting to think I had to replace the whole hub. Big difference between spending $50 for a hub or $2 bucks each for new lugs.

A nice lady in the neighborhood saw me and commented to me how nice the boat looks when I dropped it off on Saturday. I was messing around the boat and she came up to say hi and told me she saw a police car by the boat Sunday afternoon. She explained my situation that I just moved to the area and I'm going to move the boat somewhere else soon. Apparently, someone called the police and they gave me a warning ticket for having a trailer parked in a residential zone. If it was a paying ticket, the fine would be $40 bucks.

People sure do like their stupid rules around here.

Overall, I'm happy that I finally got the boat moved and I can move forward with my refit. First thing, is getting the lug bolts/nuts replaced, and a storage place for DIY work.

Lug Bolts Knocked Out

Broken Lug Bolts

Hope everyone had a good and safe Labor Day weekend.

Working On It

Almost 4 months without updates?

Yeah, I know, it's been a while without any updates. Unfortunately, there isn't too much to update right now.

I moved from Tennessee to Virginia, near DC. The boat, is still in TN. So, not much I can do. I've been to a few places looking for storage of the boat. They all have long waiting lists and it is so much more expensive between VA and MD. Still, the boat will come eventually.

I do have my spreaders with me. The paint was raised in a couple spots along with some pitting. There's a high concentration of pitting around the ends. I wanted to repaint the mast, eventually, so I decided to start with the spreaders since I have them on hand. I sanded down the paint. The hard part was getting it out of the grooves around the welded part on the end.

I cleaned them up pretty good, I think. I got some Alumiprep 33 and Alodine 1201. With these two chemicals, they are suposed to clean the metal and protect it from additional corrosion. Next will be zinc chromate primer that will start the rest of the process of the paint job... which will come later.





after the alodine, it leaves it with some color

I also have my tiller and rudder cheeks. Those are getting some coats of varnish and will be standing by until it's time to put on the boat again.

What next?

I need to re-bed the cockpit drains and may make a cover for the cockpit to protect  it from rain and more importantly, snow during winter time. The reason I mention snow is because of a leak I had last winter when it snowed heavily then rain immediately followed. Since the snow covered the cockpit drains, the rain water had nowhere to go and ended up going through the engine panel, down the engine (which has started to rust) and filled the bilge. I re-bed the engine panel so that should be good, but still need to re-bed the cockpit drains as I found out those are leaking slightly too.

Well, I have an idea for replacing the fuel tank. When the boat is here, I'll start work to remove the engine and the old fuel tank and prepare for the tank replacement. Since the engine started to rust, I need to take care of that too. While it doesn't really need a full overhaul, I might have to, to clean the rusty areas off of it. Anyone have ideas?

I'm looking at getting some supplies, like seacocks and pump service kits (bilge/galley pumps), I can work with until I can get on the boat but some things, I need to be on the boat to confirm exactly what I need, like the water-lift muffler size.

Tiller Time

Here's some of the work I've been doing on my tiller I removed from the boat. First to show how it looked before I removed it showing its condition since I bought the boat.

I removed a couple small dowel rods that were on the handle end. The split was pretty good that went through the handle and down about 6 inches.

 

I used some small screwdrivers to wedge into the end of the tiller.

I got some low density filler and mixed it into some epoxy. I took a ziploc sandwich bag, cut a small part of a corner. With the ziploc, put some of the thickened epoxy mix into the bag and used it to inject into the split. Much like how cake decorators use the icing bags.

I was able to get the epoxy down into the crack and filled the holes the dowel rods were in. I also used some of the epoxy for filling in around a couple bungs (I found they're not being used to cover screws, at least the one on the very end). Removed the screw drivers causing the epoxy to ooze out where I used a clamp to compress it until it cured.

Sanded everything down smooth. At one point, I was using 80 grit on the top since that was in the worst condition. I then used 100 and 220 grit. There is still a few dark parts that show up with the varnish but I didn't want to take too much material off. I think it just adds to its character.

While trying to figure out how I was going to varnish, I decided to bend a hanger around a shelf in a closet and hung the tiller on it with screw drivers in the mounting hole. I used a trash bag under it in the case of drips. The space between the shelf and the tiller was very close but I made sure there was no contact.

 

The first coat, I mixed mineral spirits with 25% varnish. I wanted to make sure it soaked into the wood.

Second coat, I did while the first was still tacky (over night). I waited for the proper drying time of 24hrs, went outside to sand and for the 3rd and 4th coats, about 50/50 mix.

I did the 5th coat (shown below) with 50/50 again and for the next few coats, I will be going up to about 75/25 that, I think, will fill in what's left of the grain that's still showing and smooth out even more.

I like how it is coming out and looking forward to getting it back on the boat when it warms up. I think the Epifanes finish looks a lot better than the previous finish. For a 32yr old piece of wood, it's turning out very nicely. I still need to get a bolt to replace the bronze one I broke off. I found some 6" stainless bolts that should be long enough at Jamestown Distributors with hex heads I think might work out..