New windlass, fitting sea cocks, engine work and more

I went Comar Marine on the way to the boat as I wanted Sikaflex for sealing the new sea cock later in the day. I got distracted looking around. They had a very nice set of davits, which we will need sometime in the future for the tender. I also looked at the electrical panels and some of the other chandlery. I renovated the 12 volt distribution panel this year, but it will at some stage [maybe two years time] need some more serious work on it. Anyway, they only had one tube of Sikaflex, which had expired in September, so they gave it to me.

Back at King Malu, Tim was still grinding away at the ant-fouling. He reckons its building up his arms. I'm sure it is. My right arm is still not right and I get twinges every so often in my shoulder, so I'm very thankful Tim is so strong at this.

I started cleaning up the sea cock to go back into the stern cabin. I wanted it as clean as possible for the Sikaflex to stick to, and was also using light grinding compound on the inner part to make it seal with the Blakes grease.

Ken arrived and started work looking at the engine... a few minutes later Costas arrived with the new windlass.

The old 'Sea Lion' windlass is no more. We had done all we could to revive it, but eventually gave up. It started a week ago... The mechanism was stuck solid so we needed to service it. The gypsy was also needing replacing. Taking off the gypsy took some days and broke in the process. This involved squirting WD40 into it, using an engine puller and a couple of spanners as wedges. Two days work.

Next was to get into the mechanism. We turned the windlass on its end and filled up the holes with WD40. Ken said, 'Every time you pass, use the hammer and tap around all the bolts'. I decided to only do this morning and afternoon as tapping aluminium with a heavy hammer at 10pm is a good way to make yourself unpopular with the neighbours! The aim of this was that the vibration of the hammering would help the WD40 penetrate down the shafts of the bolts. So for days I had hammered the windlass when I passed.

However getting in to the mechanism proved impossible. The bolts were totally embedded into the aluminium casting. Then we found that it would be impossible to get spares so anything needed would have to be machined specially. All this meant that even though a new windlass would be expensive, it would be cheaper than maintaining the old one. So yesterday the old windlass was declared dead.

So we bought a Quick Hector windlass from Damianu Marine. Costas is a great guy. Very helpful and knowledgeable. We spend some time working out how to mount the new windlass to optimize the its action on the chain. Basically we need it as high as possible so that the chain will go round nearly 90 degrees of the gypsy. Being smaller than the old windlass we will need to raise it about 8-10 cm. We're now looking for suitable wood to make a plinth for it to be mounted on.

The other thing Costas brought was the speed log which will need to be mounted in the hull. So we cut a pilot from the inside and then with his hole cutter, cut a mounting hole from the outside. We were shocked by the thickness of the hull. Nearly four centimetres: About nine layers of glass fibre. They don't make boats like that now!

We then decided that we should empty the fuel tank as we wanted to flush out all the old diesel before trying to start the engine. This looked like an easy task. We would remove an engine room sea cock, run a pipe down from the inlet to the lift pump for the generator and siphon the fuel into a drum for disposal. The first part was easy. Siphoning just didn't work. Eventually we used the old fresh water pump to pump it out. Not very much fuel in the tank.

Ken then decided to take of the injectors for servicing. He found the washers were all missing and the injectors very carboned up. We are slowing learning more about this Ford York engine as we go. One thing we found today was where the impeller fixes. Replacing impellers is something that happens relatively frequently and sadly is not all that easy on this engine as you have to remove the oil filter to do so. Oh well...

Final job of the day was to fix the new sea cock for the galley. We had borrowed a couple of hole cutters and these proved invaluable. We were making plastic washers - approx 10 cm diametre and 1 cm thick - from an old bread board of Tim's. Cutting them to size with the hole cutters made extremely neat washers. Then we cut through the hull. Higher up this time and the thickness only about 2.5 cm thick, still much greater than a modern production yacht. Aligning the holes for the bolts proved significantly more difficult than anticipated, but we won eventually and glued the outer brass ring and bolts in place with Sikaflex, leaving it to cure overnight before doing the inside in the morning.

All in all, good days work!