The new water tank

It's on its way, it fits in the keel, and it is constructed using the green heat gun he's holding here, and the tool John created.

Facing the Music (or the Polypropylene)

The music is that we are unlikely to get this done in time to truck her out to the west coast so we can live aboard for the summer this year. Bummer. We will be back in the fall, and will have the winter here to work on what we don't get done now. I suppose the good bit about that is that it will be less of a press! The bad bit is that living in a motor home will be less romantic than living aboard in the marina. Sigh.

Meanwhile, the setback of the tank rebuilding has generated its own set of interesting projects, one of which is the welding of a polyethylene water tank. After looking at everything he could find on the internet, John has built himself a plastic welding nozzle. Currently he is making cardboard templates with which to cut the irregular sides of the new tank. The polyethylene sheets and "rope" for welding them arrived very promptly.

A path through the forest of set-backs

Oh the mess! The cabin sole (floor) of the main salon is all torn up. John used our GIGANTIC wet and dry vacuum to suck up the last of the diesel fuel and water. The tank spaces are all clean and dry. He drilled a hole in the hull, and 5 gallons flowed out! Then he used his 5- ton "come-along"  to winch out a great slab of railway line that had been part of the ballast, encased in cement. It's a great heavy thing now obstructing the cockpit.

His next step will be to cut a piece out of the side of the keel so as to get at the area where the steel web between water and fuel tanks had been split by the expansion of freezing water: he will be able to access it for re-welding. Then he will pour something in to fill up the newly opened keel space-maybe runny cement, maybe epoxy (of which we do have a lifetime supply)


Our sand-recycling sandblaster turns out not to be the thing for this job, so it is listed on eBay and we are going to buy another one. John tried it out on the rudder, but either the nozzle is wrong or the power of the compressor is not a proper match, and the results were poor. At least our storied compressor starts up and runs beautifully (unless it runs out of fuel, which it did yesterday.) We started to think "Oh no, it really isn't fixed after all that trouble we had with it!" but it was just trying unsuccessfully to run on air, poor thing. It sure is loud.

  When the keel is re-welded, it will be time to sand-blast that newly exposed area as well as the other areas that need re-spraying with molten aluminum. We'll dust the deck gently, and repaint that as well. All of this should happen soon. The aluminum sprayer did work the last time John fired it up, so we hope nothing has fallen apart in the meantime. If we don't get it all done in time to re-launch and live aboard this summer as planned,  we do have a fall-back arrangement in the shape of a motor home generously offered by our  good friend Bernie Littlejohn from Williams Lake. (Thank you, Bernie!)

Meanwhile,  we do work on hopefully.  It never seems like much, but we are gnawing away little by little and day by day on the project, and it sure is fun.