Saturday, March 24, 2007
Work progress Update
A lot of work has been done so far. KG has replaced the fresh water (circulating) pump on the engine, and rebuilt the starter motor. He's rebed a lot of suspicious stuff on the port deck, and rebed and resealed the mast boot and collar where it passes through the deck. Inside looks pretty good.
Pat Croak spent yesterday sanding the bottom, and reports that he has about 2 more hours of work to do. Scott McGinley and I spent the morning working on electronics and wiring and other miscellaneous items. We got the two Garmin nav consoles back from garmin, installed them and reconfigured them. I'm happy to report the entire system came back online without any issues. It also looks like Garmin has corrected a few bugs with the AIS system.
We also tackled the somewhat daunting task of installing the remote control head for the VHF marine radio. Jim and I had previously selected a spot back by the engine panel. We removed the backup starter button (since last season we confirmed that the ignition switch was not the culprit in our starter problems), and we drilled out the hole behind the mounting plate so that it was large enough to accommodate the wiring harness for the remote head. (Our hole saw failed about 9/10 of the way through.) We got the whole thing mounted and then ran the control cable back to the nav station. That turned out to be difficult. The "easy way" to run the control cables didnt leave us enough cable length to make it all the way, so we took a more direct route through an old wiring channel. We struggled with it, but some messenger line, a coat hanger, and a lot of huffing and puffing (mostly on my part) got us through. We left the messenger line in there for future use. We did have to cut the cable (of course... we always do) so I still have to get a soldering iron down there and splice the thing back together. That's today's project.
We replaced half of the baggywrinkles (mizzen mast set) before the weather got a bit chilly. We'll wait on better weather for the main mast set. We also replaced all of the fenders on the boat with a new set that I bought on sale at West Marine.
Pat Croak spent yesterday sanding the bottom, and reports that he has about 2 more hours of work to do. Scott McGinley and I spent the morning working on electronics and wiring and other miscellaneous items. We got the two Garmin nav consoles back from garmin, installed them and reconfigured them. I'm happy to report the entire system came back online without any issues. It also looks like Garmin has corrected a few bugs with the AIS system.
We also tackled the somewhat daunting task of installing the remote control head for the VHF marine radio. Jim and I had previously selected a spot back by the engine panel. We removed the backup starter button (since last season we confirmed that the ignition switch was not the culprit in our starter problems), and we drilled out the hole behind the mounting plate so that it was large enough to accommodate the wiring harness for the remote head. (Our hole saw failed about 9/10 of the way through.) We got the whole thing mounted and then ran the control cable back to the nav station. That turned out to be difficult. The "easy way" to run the control cables didnt leave us enough cable length to make it all the way, so we took a more direct route through an old wiring channel. We struggled with it, but some messenger line, a coat hanger, and a lot of huffing and puffing (mostly on my part) got us through. We left the messenger line in there for future use. We did have to cut the cable (of course... we always do) so I still have to get a soldering iron down there and splice the thing back together. That's today's project.
We replaced half of the baggywrinkles (mizzen mast set) before the weather got a bit chilly. We'll wait on better weather for the main mast set. We also replaced all of the fenders on the boat with a new set that I bought on sale at West Marine.
