The plywood floor sections that span the stringers between the engines had gotten a little grimy over the winter so we decided to bring them home and paint them again. When we originally made them several years ago, we slapped on a coat of Benjamin Moore house paint that we had left over at home. During the evenings this week we applied some very durable high gloss deck paint to each of the three sections. There's also a fourth section but we had to leave it in place so we'd have something to stand on as we climbed out of the engine space.
We installed the three sections on Saturday. Big improvement and the surface is now easy to clean.
Then we began to work our way through the list of little things that still needed to be done. We started with new fuel line from the fuel pump to the carb on the starboard side. This is the engine that has given us so much trouble once it was warmed up. Seemed like fuel starvation so now we have all new fuel line from the tank to the fuel filer and from the filter to the fuel pump. We also replaced the line from the fuel pump to the new carb. Everything's new from the tank to the carb inlet. (We previously also replaced the fuel pump on that engine.) Can't wait to fire it up in another month or so and see how she runs.
We also fabricated a connection between the throttle cables and the new port carburetor. Not exactly a factory design but it's strong and the throttle cables operate very smoothly.
We added new overflow tubing from the tops of the fuel pumps the the carbs and then, finally down to the last thing, connecting the ground wires for the electric chokes. Edelbrock recommends connecting the grounds to one of the three tiny screws that hold the choke adjustment ring in place. That's fine, but those tiny screws are Torx head. Why Torx when they could have been Allen or even Phillips? No idea, but we did dig up an unused set of Torx sockets that we had in our workshop. We did the starboard choke first but when we removed that same screw from the port choke, the Torx socket made its last bid for freedom and jumped into the bilge next to the port engine. This is what makes these seemingly small jobs take so long.
We rigged a light and squeezed down next to the port engine and there was Torx, hiding up against a stringer. We retrieved it and made the ground connection.
Then it was time to clean up. We took a picture of each engine with all the tools and garbage removed.
That white box in front of the starboard engine is used for storage. It hooks over a stringer to keep it from moving and touching the engine. Spare oil and transmission fluid are stored in milk crates located under the gray floor sections shown at the left of the engine. We do likes things nice and neat down there.
To make this part of the project really complete, we'll install the new, slightly shorter, belt on the port alternator before we leave for the weekend. Then it's on to installing new LED lights in the galley. After more than two months with the engines, that job should be fun.
On Sunday, we put a first coat of deck paint on the last floor section at home and then, once on the boat, filled the port heat exchanger with water-antifreeze mix. Looks like we'll need more. Two gallons didn't fill it completely.
Then we moved inside the boat to install the two strips of LED lights in the galley. These strips each contain 36 LEDS and are supposed to be held in place with tiny clips. The holes in the clips were smaller than any screw that we had available and even if he had found a screw that small, we didn't have a screwdriver small enough to use them. Instead, we bought two tubes of super-glue like adhesive. The instructions said that this stuff could be used like contact cement by coating both mounting surfaces and then letting them dry for five or ten minutes. That's what we did and they indeed did stick, although we had to go back over each one, pushing the strip up against the mounting surface until all eight clips adhered.
The first LED strip was mounted just above the sliding plastic doors behind which Frances stores glasses and lot of other stuff. "Lots" was the operative word as I cleaned out that cabinet before starting this installation. Here's what it looked like as the contact cement dried.
We discussed this and decided to install a switch for these LEDs behind the sliding plastic door, so that no wiring would be apparent. Before we left on Sunday morning, we made an L-bracket out of some aluminum and mounted a 12-volt toggle switch that we had on hand. That went inside the cabinet.
That nasty looking thing above the switch is the air conditioning control panel. The most time consuming part of this was running a 12-volt DC wire from the galley, down under the floor and up under the lower steering station to connect to a power source.
The galley is L-shaped and we have another strip of LEDs to mount along the port side of the galley cabinet. We ran out of time to mount that second LED strip and connect it to the first one today, but we'll get that done next weekend.
Difficult to see from these photos because of our camera's flash, but the old galley looked nice with this new lighting.
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