Current location for King Malu

Saturday 17 July 2010

Batteries being installed

Yesterday I painted with epoxy the battery cage, so today was fix it in place and get the batteries wired... didn't finish, of course, but did get a long way there.

In the morning I cut some marine ply for the cage: 2cm thick marine ply!  This is so that when the batteries are in place they will not roll about and should worst come to worst and the boat ever rolls 180 degrees, the batteries will not fall out. You really don't want 200 plus kilos of batteries free running around your engine room!

But before we could fix the battery cage back in place we had to refit the motor. The flange that joined the motor to the UJ (universal joint) was re-machined on Thursday to fix two problems - firstly one of the bolts thread was chewed up and two of the others didn't look to good and secondly alignment was dependent on the bolts which was not great. So Louis re-tapped the holes for larger bolts and created a stud alignment for the flange to the UJ. Worked great.

So after the motor was back in place we bolted the battery cage in place and then started wiring and fixing the woodwork. Almost finished but not quite. Would have got further if I could have found the Stanley knife to cut the insulation off some wires, but the boat seems to have this habit of getting really untidy and then being unable to find anything. The degree if untidiness is directly proportional to the number of people working on the boat at the same time... so with Tim, me, Daniel, Ken and Louis all working on the boat on Wednesday you can see it got pretty untidy!

I started tidying again in an effort to find the Stanley knife. It should be easier now in that with the battery cage in place we won't be tripping over 8 deep discharge batteries and a fairly heft motor controller all the time.

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