We took last weekend off. It snowed on Saturday and on Sunday, we took a short road trip to Stonington. It's one of our favorite places and it gave Frances a chance to drop off some jewelry for repair.
On the way to Stonington, we took a photo of Norwich in the winter, something we don't usually get to see. Not a very good photo but it was cold and we were too lazy to get out of the car..
This weekend, the snow had melted and the weather was moderate for January so we collected our notes and headed off to the boat to finish the installation of the port heat exchanger. We had it bolted down but were unable to reconnect the long length of hose from the engine circulating pump to the heat exchanger. Old hoses defy anything you try to do with them so we brought this one home so we could make up a new hose. This hose had a copper elbow in it that really didn't want to come loose. It did, eventually, with some heat from our heat gun.
As we get further into this cooling system rehab project, we've come to realize that most, if not all, of these old hoses are going to have to be replaced. Why take a chance with a 30 year old hose?
Even with new hose of the right inside diameter, these hoses are incredibly difficult to attach. Here's the port heat exchanger with the large hoses in place. The bottom one near that red battery cable was a bitch!
We stripped off the other 3/4 and 1-inch hoses that attach to the heat exchanger and took the parts home to put everything together there.
Then we started on the starboard side. The first job was to mount the bracket that holds the heat exchanger over the transmission at the back of the engine. It looks easy but took half an hour to get the bracket lined up so we could insert and tighten the new bolts, lock washers and nuts.
That hose assembly you see in the foreground is the one we took home to disassemble. It directs the hot seawater from the heat exchanger through a copper "T" fitting and then out those two hoses to the exhaust elbows, where the cooling water is mixed with the engine exhaust and dumped overboard.
That's where we left things on Saturday afternoon when it started to get cold in the shed.
On Sunday morning, fortified by The New York Times and a great breakfast courtesy of Frances, we pried off the old hoses, wire brushed the copper "T" fittings, primed and painted them. Don't laugh. Everything else was refinished, so why not them too?
Once back on the boat, we mounted the heat exchanger on that bracket and attached the hose from the engine circulating pump (that 1-1/4 inch hose was pure agony to attach to the port on the bottom of the heat exchanger just like it was on the port side). Then, armed with new 3/4-inch and 1-inch hose, we cut the sections we needed, attached them to our "T" fittings and mounted the hose assemblies to the heat exchanger. It certainly looks nice and we'd show you a picture but we left the camera on the boat.
That completes the rehab project on the two heat exchangers. It turned out to be more extensive than we'd thought and eventually included some rewiring and the removal of the extra battery.
We've been told to expect the new exhaust elbows this week and if that turns out to be correct, we'll install them next weekend. We've already removed the mounting bolts and the hose clamps from the old elbows and it looks as though we're going to have to whack the elbows off the manifolds with a very large hammer because they they are really stuck on there.
Hey, it's an old boat. What else can you expect?
One note about this blog. We've just passed 5,200 page views. That's amazing too us considering that it's all about two people owning and maintaining a 30+ year old power boat. Granted, lots of people who search on a particular keyword that we've used end up at our blog and probably leave just as quickly, but still, a lot of people have found us and we have to assume, read a little of what we've posted.
Google provides us with statistics about the blog. We don't know individually who visited, but we do get to see what country visitors are from and what blog post seemed to draw the most interest and to us, at least, that's really interesting.
When we put a picture of our Colt 380 automatic on the blog, the page views increased dramatically within 24 hours. Almost two years ago, we wrote a blog called, "Having some fun with Silverton," which was intended to be a parody of a 1980 Silverton brochure where everything good on the boat was optional (as it actually was, back then). That blog post also seems to be one of the most popular ones.
The all-time leader so far was a blog post we wrote about buying a small sofa for the boat from Ikea. This inexpensive sofa was made in eastern Europe somewhere, and the model name that Ikea had for it was "Klobo." We had such fun dragging it up on in boat the middle of the winter and assembling it that we began to call it Klobo. It's still on our boat today and has seen lots of use. That post drew readers from all over, many of whom were from Europe. It is still drawing readers today.
We certainly hope that "Klobo" isn't a provocative term in some other language.
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