We havn't been looking forward to this. Getting three new control cables up (or down) that little PVC tube from the bridge to the engine space wasn't going to be fun. While we waited for the third cable to come in, we thought long and hard about just how we'd approach it.
- The cables are long (27, 29 and 30 ft.) and are really not that flexible
- There are a lot of electrical cables in the pipe already and we need every one of them
- We'd need two people: One to push and one to pull
- The PVC pipe in the engine space is almost out of reach
- It's cold on the boat.
We pulled off the winter cover that protects the bridge, unpacked the three cables and marked the length on each one. We also fired up the electric heater in the cabin so we'd have some place to go to get warm.
These cables definitely had a mind of their own. Keeping them untangled was a challenge so we draped them out over the front of the bridge.
Our plan was to tape all three cables together staggering them by about seven inches so we wouldn't have a lump to force down the pipe.
As we wrapped, we included a length of plastic clothesline that we had pulled up the pipe when we installed then new bridge power cables. That would be our pilot line.
Frances went below to the engine space to pull on the clothesline and I pushed the beginning of the cable-wrap into the pipe. As Francse gently tugged on the line, I pushed the control cables into the pipe. Amazingly, that worked great.The control cables slid into the pipe easily as long as we coordinated our pull and pushing. Then the cables stopped. We were snagged on something. No amount of pulling on our clothesline helped. Damn! Things were going so well.
I went below, crawled down behind the starboard engine and up over the v-drive.
I shined a light on the end of the pipe and there were our control cables! The clothesline was hopelessly tangled in the wiring but our cables had made the trip and they wouldn't go any further because they were hitting a vent hose. I untangled the clothesline, pulled the bundled cables to one side and pulled all three all the way down to the space between the engines.
While we congratulated ourselves, we cut the tape off and routed the three cables to their final destinations: 30 ft. cable to the port carb, 29 ft. cable to the starboard carb and the 27 ft. cable to the starboard transmission.
As we said in a previous post, we decided not to change the port transmission cable on either the upper or lower helm because it worked effortlessly Why spend money when we didn't have to?
Then it was time to route the other ends of the cables up behind the upper helm. We didn't follow the factory routing exactly but they went in just fine. Actually, each of the three cables could have been at least a foot shorter but there was no way to know that until they were installed.
We'll do the final corrections later. This was enough for one afternoon.
We took ourselves to lunch at Farrell's, a local watering hole, where the soup helped get us back to normal operating temperature.
Then it was a stop at the Portland Public Library to attend the opening of a photography exhibition by our old friend Stu Noelte. Stu is a former boater and is the person responsible for us owning our last boat, "Mad Dog." With boating out of his system, Stu now has a MFA degree and is the art teacher at Portland High School. He is also a gifted photographer and his favorite subject is trains and that's what his show was all about: beautifully photographed trains complete with photo captions that we found fascinating.
For those of you who don't know, there are many "railfans" who find and follow trains and know a great deal about them. Many of Stu's railroading friends attended his opening and we even met people there that we knew.
Stu is the guy in the center and the blonde with the great smile is his friend Loren, who we have always wanted to meet.
There was quite a crowd and the Portland library was the perfect setting for his show. We talked to one couple who has driven from Pennsylvania to see his work.
Getting the damn control cables in was good. Seeing Stu's photographs and meeting some of his railfan friends was perfect.
On Sunday, we began connecting the new cables to the upper helm controls and the engines. The helm controls have little ball joints that thread onto the cable ends. New new cables came with jam-nuts that are used to keep the ball joints from unscrewing, although we don't see how they ever could. We took some care here to screw each fitting on the cable ends exactly the same number of turns so that the controls would be even. It has always irritated us that for a particular throttle setting on this boat, the handles on the helm control were uneven.
It takes two open-end wrenches to secure the ball joints at the end of the new cables to the helm control.
With the upper ends of the cables connected, we headed down to the engine space to connect the cables to the carb linkage. Silverton used an odd little double bracket arrangement to secure the cable housing to the engine and it took us a while to get both the upper and lower helm throttle cables in the bracket just where they were supposed to be. This took longer than we thought it would.
At the ends of the cable, we mounted the fittings from the old cables and did our best to make sure they were absolutely even. Here's the starboard throttle cables attached to the Edelbrock carb.
The connection to the throttle arm on the carb is little unorthodox but it works.
Before leaving for the day, we connected the new cables to the port engine and then tested the upper and lower throttle controls, which had always been sticky and unpredictable. Now the throttle travel is even and smooth, although there is a little more drag that we expected. No problem, though. The throttles advance very nicely with a lot less effort and when brought down, cause the linkage to bottom out on the curb idle stops perfectly.
We still have to connect a new cable to the starboard transmission and that will take some crawling around in the bulge but we're used to that.
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