Plastic welding

We've ordered polyethylene sheets and John is adapting his heat gun to be a plastic welder, so as to create a new water tank.
He's drilled a hole in the hull to let our mixture of diesel oil and water drain out, and plans to pull out the sections of rail we put into the bilge on top of the melted lead for ballast. Then he will refill the bilge with concrete and put the new water tank on top.
Our girls always complained that the water on the boat tasted of the fibreglass lining of the original tank, so there will be no more of that.
The diesel leak was extremely small, but he is welding a new plate onto the bottom of that tank as well.

As we wait for the arrival of the polyethylene sheets, we will get on with fitting the interior finishing skin to the salon, head and galley....nevertheless, this new wrinkle does likely mean a later completion date for this project.

The trouble with the water tank

It seems water leaked down into the bilge, froze, and tore the internal keel partition separating the water and fuel tanks. The giveaway was slight bulging visible in the exterior keel....John has seen a few earlier cases of water freezing and splitting steel structures....really a powerful, impressive force of nature. The next step for us is to remove the tank top on the fuel tank, inspect that too, and drain the fuel. In this picture the clean drained water tank can be seen, and aft of it the top of the fuel tank still in place. 

John will drill holes in the keel to evacuate any remaining water and fuel, then refill the deepest sections of the keel with cement, and weld new tank bottoms on both the water and fuel tanks.

Two steps forward, one step back!

Since wrote last, I took a trip to LA, leaving John with his brother George to do some sandblasting and metal spraying. After its original sandblasting, our steel hull  was coated ("flame sprayed") with aluminum. This worked brilliantly until the day we gave her over-barnacled, in need of a bottom clean- to a shipyard unfamiliar with the process. They went at the barnacles  exuberantly, blasting back down to the bare steel before repainting, in spite of John's pleas for a light hand. Now, many years later, the only patches on the hull which show rust are the ones where the flame-sprayed aluminum coat was removed. So John & George hoped to sandblast those spots and  fire up our very own, historic Metco metal sprayer for a coating with the rolls of aluminum wire we have on hand.

They pulled out the compressor and  fired it up. (We drove down to buy it from an ex-biker dude in Florida two years ago-a  story I'll get back to. It sits on its own trailer, the easiest trailer I have ever towed!)

Then John and George pulled out our second-hand 1969 military-issue recirculating sand-blaster. We've never used it, but it looked like it would be a good thing. Its appeal lies in that  recirculating the sand. When we originally had the hull sandblasted in our backyard in downtown Ottawa, the sandblasting caused such a huge cloud that we had a visit from the department of the environment (just after we had a visit from the police because of the noise.) But it turns out not to work very well. It's theoretically a simple device, but for the moment that whole part of the project is on the back burner.

They decided to do some interior finishing,  work that would show some progress  when I got back. They didn't want me to think that while I was away they had ONLY spent their time eating fine meals and drink great beer. So we have had great visible progress on the look of the interior.

We have been finishing off a whole series of little cosmetic items, and decided yesterday to lift up the floors in the main salon to reassure ourselves of the state of the water and fuel tanks before installing the final plumbing.
As the lid came off the water tank, John said, "Why is it pink?" and I said, "Why does it smell like kerosene?"