Ready for the water

Well, King Malu is finally ready for the water. Friday morning 07:30 she returns to her natural environment.

Tim and I had taken three days leave from work to finish all the anti-fouling and electrical work and get her generally ready for the water.

The new Axiom propellor looks great. We have lashed it firmly in the engine room as the new electric drive doesn't arrive till Monday and we need a week of bench testing before installing in King Malu.

The nut is held in place with a 'tab washer', which is something new to Tim and me, but seems a vastly better way that the castle nut and split pin that many props are held in place with.

Because we don't have the electric drive working yet, we'll be using the Honda outboard for the first few weeks. Also keeping it ready for service because we will be extensively testing the new PropEL drive and running the battery systems down to empty to check range etc.

The Nav Station is now completely rewired and working. I'm very pleased with this. It's both more logical (for easier maintenance) and easier to see and use and just looks a lot smarter.

At it's heart is the new electrical panel, cut for us by Julian at thebeast.co.uk. Very pleased with that too.

 And finally... as they say on TV news... Tim remarked how the two holes for the bow thruster make King Malu look like a shark coming towards you!

Productive Weekend - Two steps forward, no steps back!

The main task for the weekend was to get the rudder back on King Malu. Repairs complete, so a couple of layers of hull guard and some anti-fouling round the stock (we'll put anti-fouling on the whole hull later).

The bolts holding the rudder plate go into threads in the epoxy for the hull. This slightly worries me, but it's been like it for decades so I am guessing it will be OK.

With the rudder back on it feels like King Malu is nearly ready for the water. The new electric drive was supposed to be picked up in Italy on Friday, so it's all coming together.

Tim lightly sanded the whole hull and it's looking very much better. We could have sanded slightly more and the colour would be restored, but we want to give a thorough sanding before we paint the hull in a year or two's time, so didn't want to remove too much of the gelcoat.

We couldn't actually go back in the water this week even if we were ready. The marina is changing the pontoons and we have been blocked in where we are on the hard by the finger pontoons. We've been assured they will be gone in two weeks!

The other task is the electrical panel. This photo doesn't do it justice. I ran out of spade terminal sockets so could not finish it. Will do so later in the week.

Final thing was to measure up the exhaust pipe for the generator. We have been using a rubber exhaust, but we want to get it out of the way of the new electric motor, so will get a custom stainless steel one bent and welded. Tim came up with a brilliant idea to use the heat of the exhaust to heat the water for onboard hoat water, so when I go talk to Techno-Metaliki about the exhaust, we want to see if they can make a sleeve for water heating around the exhaust.

A bucket of water and...

Early start to the day was a quick trip down to Limassol to see Harris at Ocean Marine. Our preferred paint is Awlgrip and Harris is the importer for the island. Awlgrip seems to last slightly longer as anti-fouling and is very much harder as topsides paint. Next year (maybe the year after) we'll try to get the hull spray painted with Awlgrip.

We were picking up anti-fouling. Yes, that means we very close to going back in the water. We heard that the mark 3 electric drive is having final tests run early next week and should be dispatched to us on Thursday from Italy.

Back in the water by 8th or 15th March hopefully.

 After we returned from Limassol, Mike and Paul arrived with the Honda HP20 outboard that they had serviced. Heavy beast... well relatively.

So they backed up Mike's pickup and lifted it onto the mounting which we had repaired... connected up and filled a bucket with water so we could test it. Fired first time. Works like a dream this outboard.

Paul is now available for hire if you have problems with you diesel inboard or petrol outboard. Contact him through the Malu Marine website.

Meanwhile Tim was masking up the repairs we had done to the hull so that later we can epoxy paint them prior to anti-fouling. Actually we didn't get to the painting, because we fixed a couple of bolts on through hull fittings and did a little more wiring on the chart table.

The other thing we did was to test fit the propellor from Axiom, having machined the nut. It's not the final fit as the tab washer needs marking and start bending before we can fit permanently, but this will happen within a few days!

Restoration... and repair

One of the long term jobs we have been doing is rewiring the electrics. Simple enough... except we had to make the panels, and completely redo the woodwork around the chart table.

Today was the start of the end of this process... varnishing the woodwork. I managed to get two coats on and tomorrow hopefully the third and possibly last coat. Then start installing the panels and wiring!

A repair job we completed today was the mounting brackets for the outboard motor.

When we removed the outboard for servicing we found that the right angle aluminium mounting brackets had fractured and were on their way to failing and dropping our outboard in the sea. So... repair was critical... but somehow we managed to measure incorrectly and so the CAD drawings, when transferred to 4mm stainless steel, were wrong and had to have Louis, our friendly engineer, redrill them.