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Saturday, June 17, 2017

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.

6 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you. Been a long grueling process that has finally neared the end. I sure hope it holds up when it starts getting used.

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  2. Nordhavns have fiberglass fuel tanks, and those folks have some good arguments in favor of them, so it doesn't sound crazy to me. Excellent work!

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    1. Thanks!
      I figured a lot of production boats would go with roto-molded plastic, but thinking of the amount of fuel those boats can hold, fiberglass does make sense for the strength, and perhaps even help structurally with the rest of the boat.

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  3. Wow! You really do nice work! Catching up on your blog and I can't quite figure out why I don't get updates for it. It's probably because i don't know where to look for them.

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    1. Thanks! After working on all this for the past year and a half, I'm glad it turned out as well as it did. Thanks for stopping by, again. :)

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