Why some people should never wire a boat

No kidding. We actually found this length of wire in the rat's nest of connections next to the extra (5th) battery that was mounted outside of the starboard engine. Can you imagine adding four butt connectors to splice a short run of wire?  Anyway, it's gone now but more about that later.

We had great weather this weekend and even in the metal shed where our boat is stored, the temperature got up to 50 degrees.  When we left the boatyard on Saturday afternoon at 4:15 PM, the temperature display in the car showed 62 degrees. But, we all know that the warm weather won't last for long. It is January in New England.

Before we took the New Years weekend off, we were trying, without much success, to remove the 1-1/4-inch ID hose from the oil cooler that serves the starboard v-drive.  It's the first in line for sea water after the seacock and we wanted to make sure that there was nothing stuck in the oil cooler inlet screen. We had to work around the domino effect here. The heat exchanger was off after having been boiled out and repaired and once we reinstalled it, we wouldn't be able to get to that oil cooler. So it was now or never as we arrived on Saturday afternoon.

Two weekends ago, tried heating the hose with our heat gun. The hose wouldn't budge. This Saturday, we tried again and kept the heat gun on that hose until it started to smoke.  Then we used a large slip-joint wrench to twist it and off it came. Success!. Of course, when we looked into the inlet in the oil cooler, it was as clean as can be, so all that work was for nothing except now we know there's nothing in there.

 The heat had deformed the end of the hose so we bought 6 ft. of Trident wire-reinforced hose. That is exactly what had been on there but we found the new Trident hose to have a thinner wall and it seemed to be much more flexible.  With the help of a little dish washing liquid, the new hose went on fairly easily. Here it is installed at the seacock.

While we were doing all of this, we had a visit from Brian, a friend from the Silverton Owner's Club. We chatted with Brian about boats old and new and toured the boatyard looking for bits and pieces of trim that he might be able to use as he brings back his 83 Silverton 34C. Brian knows a lot about boats and is a real craftsman. Next time he visits, we may just get him to help with whatever we've doing!

Once Brian left, we we needed to do something about that extra 5th battery. (Again, we could get to it because the port heat exchanger was not yet re-mounted.)  The wiring for it was a mess and it's among that tangle that we found the 8-inch length of wire with four butt connectors in it that we showed at the beginning of this post.

 We had always assumed that that extra battery was there to operate the anchor windlass but once we disconnected it and traced out the wiring, we found that it was there to power the old Norcold refrigerator that we got rid of last winter. Come to think of it, that low capacity wiring would never operate a windlass. And how about that ceramic fuse holder?

Knowing that, we removed all that brittle old wiring, took out the battery and vacuumed up all the
left over junk.  There always seems to be a handfull of wiring for the dumpster..

That space is now empty except for those two red wires that connect to the v-drive low pressure warning light switch.  We'll tie them down properly next weekend.

Before we left on Sunday afternoon, we used our electric drill with a wire brush to get rid of most of the rust and scaling paint on the intake manifolds, reverse gears and v-drives. We then applied a cost of Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer.  Next weekend, we'll add some blue Rustoleum engine paint and then remount the starboard heat exchanger. Can't do the port heat exchanger until we get the port starter back. Time to call Joe's Auto Electric and ask about that starter. They said they weren't busy at this time of year.