The snow is making us nutty

 We know that many of our readers live here in the northeast so having us complaint about the snow is fairly boring. But, we're getting by. The Snow Blower still starts but it's getting difficult to find a place to blow the snow. We've taken pictures, of course, but they'll only be fun to look at while we're enjoying a cocktail on the deck in July.

We have nothing new to report on the starboard engine head replacement project. We haven't visited the boat in six weeks and that's a first for us. Normally by now, we'd be finished the last "fun" boat project, charging the batteries and counting the weeks before we go back in the water. The spring freshet on the Connecticut River should be something this year!

In the middle of all this snow, Bill's ancient Mercury decided to stop providing heat while overheating the engine. After checking with the locals who couldn't (or didn't want to) find a solution, we took the car to two of the best mechanics we know, Gary and Al at Hicks Garage in Cromwell, Connecticut. (Gary and Al are also big time boaters, which is where we met them many years ago.) It didn't take them long to find the problem and it isn't pretty. Air in the cooling system that, they think, is coming from a failed head gasket or a cracked head. They're digging into the engine and we'll know what they come up with in a few days.

Last Sunday, as it started snowing once again, Frances decided to make a pizza, something she hasn't tried before. We thought this might make a funny video so we set up the cameras in the kitchen and off she went. The resultant video was really long and we attempted to cut it down to something that could be consumed at one sitting.

The pizza? Absolutely delicious, although Frances feels she can make one even better. That's fine. Bill will eat pizza like that any day!

Winter drags on with a vengence

As predicted, it snowed again a couple of times last week and it's snowing again now as we write this on Saturday, February 14. No big deal, but its also been cold. It hasn't been above about 25 degrees in days and we've managed to go through 20 lbs of seed in our bird feeder.

As we were writing this, we received an automated call from the City of Hartford announcing another parking ban for tonight and tomorrow. That's a real issue here in Hartford where the neighborhood streets are barely wider than a single lane because people leave their cars in the street during a storm and just take a chance that they won't be towed.

We have a four-car garage so our cars are never on the street and are usually clear of snow when we want to use them. Many of our neighbors have garages as well but often those garages are unusable because they are filled with stuff.

However, there were signs of spring this week. We received the registration renewals from the Department of Motor Vehicles for Act Three and our inflatable. That's one we never mind paying even though it will be several months before we can put on those stickers and drop the boat in the water.

We also received the summer slip contract from our marina, Marina at American Wharf and a membership renewal from Sea Tow. At this point, anything that looks like spring is very welcome.

We're not complaining about the snow...

After all, we live in southern New England and that's what happens in the winter but we are getting a little tired of it about now.  As we write this on February 7, the forecast is for more snow and very low temperatures. That means another weekend when we can't complete the replacement of the heads on our starboard engine. We're almost there, though. Maybe next weekend will be a little better.

Unlike other parts of New England, here in Hartford snow isn't handled very well. Our Mayor closes the streets to parking so the plows can get through but many people don't bother to move their cars so the streets are never really clear.

This is the street in front of our house. We know, our sidewalk needs to be cleared (again) but it's snowing now so we'll wait at least until it stops.

Our ancient Ariens SnowBlower fired right up and has chewed through this stuff three times so far and we have a feeling that we'll be coaxing it back to life once again tomorrow morning.

However, we haven't been wasting our time. Our company has a couple of new clients and it's always difficult to learn more about what they need so we've been spending our leisure time on that.

We've also finally come to grips with the conversion of our office computer network from Windows XP to a newer operating system. Not very exciting compared to installing rebuilt cylinder heads but it has to be done even though it really doesn't do much except enrich Microsoft Corporation.

We rebuilt two of the four computers on our LAN and upgraded them to Windows 7 and we're now working on the last two. We've found that changing technology means that we can only get about five years, max, out of a workstation. Since we're cheap New Englanders, we do all the computer work ourselves. Last spring, we replaced a home-brewed Windows Server with a new Linux "appliance" that is about the size of a shoebox. We bought that unit instead of building one but the next time, we're going to tackle that ourselves, too.

Now, while we wished we were on our boat wrenching, we're spending our snowy weekends gutting the former file server and making it into a new machine. No sense in buying a new computer cabinet or optical drive when we can salvage at least those parts. We told you were were, let's just say, thrifty.

We've also spent some time when we'd normally be working on the boat to further improve our video editing skills. We shoot thrilling sequences such as cars driving by our house or birds enjoying our bird feeder and then edit those sequences and add sound and special effects. It is surprisingly complicated but if the kids on You Tube can do it, we'll be damned if we can't too.

Speaking of You Tube, we've had a "channel" there for the last five years. For us, it's just a fun way to publish our boating life but it has grown quite a lot despite the narrow lifestyle interest it serves. We have 147 subscribers to the channel and our videos have been viewed over 490,000 times. Videos about boat maintenance always get a lot of views and surprisingly, we get very few nasty comments.

The most popular video we ever posted was taken at Mitchell's in Greenport, Long Island during our visit in July, 2013. It's just some poor guy in a go-fast boat trying to get out of his slip. We thought it was funny, even though we've all been through that docking problem more times than we'd like to admit.

That video has garnered almost 200 comments and some of them not very polite. It's amazing to us that something this simple (and short) would be viewed more than 100,000 times.  It certainly underscores the importance of You Tube.

Here's a link to that video.

Intake Manifold On

We were back at it on Sunday. Our next step was to reinstall the intake manifold. A friend had offered to give us a hand with it because it's heavy but since we were there with gaskets ready, we decided to give it a try ourselves.

One note about the photo shown above. It's taken from video and it appears that the engine is rusty. It isn't. Our lighting consists of four clip-on lights, each with one of those compact fluorescent bulbs. They give off a weird light that I have to set the camera to compensate for and I haven't bothered to do that so far. Anyway, everything is shiny and bright.

The manifold is more awkward than heavy. There's really no place to grab the back of it without getting your fingers between the manifold and the block. After putting on the four gaskets, being careful to add some extra sealant at the corners, we put the manifold in place. And yes, we used Permatex Black Gasket Maker on all the surfaces before we started.

On this particular engine, the position of the mounting bolt holes makes putting the new bolts in really time consuming. We've shown a little of that in the video. Only an offset box wrench seems to work on the five or six most difficult ones. Figuring out how to torque them down will be a challenge. But, everything about this job has been a challenge to some degree, so we'll figure that out too.

Our video is short, which I'm sure most of our friends are thankful for.

As we write this early evening on January 25, we're being bombarded with news of a big blizzard heading our way. Yikes, I'll bet the supermarket is out of bread. What do people do with all that bread? This is New England, after all. It snows here. Get used to it!

Okay, we took a weekend off

It was cold and we thought we'd be more productive if we didn't do anything on the boat and instead, stayed home and enjoyed ourselves. And that's what we did.

First, of course, we had a little shopping to do, but once home, we dived into making a good dinner or two. Frances makes great eggplant and while it's time consuming to cook, it's also really good. Bill was there to help, although how useful he was is up for debate.

Then we were going to fire up our old bread machine and create a nice loaf. This machine was given to us perhaps 20 years ago by someone who had received it as a wedding gift and never used it, so God knows how old it is. It has worked for us many times in the past, creating cheese bread that will melt in your mouth and appear within days on your waistline. Our kind of bread!

Our selection for today was some kind of nut-fruit-chocolate bread, the recipe for which we found in a newspaper. Sounded great. We poured in the ingredients and pushed the "on" button. The machine turned on and began kneading the dough, so we left it and moved on. How bad can it be, we thought?

After preparing the stuff for the bread machine, our plan was to cook one of our favorite meatloafs. (That must be meatloaves, although that sounds strange.) This recipe is also one we must have clipped from a newspaper, given its title: "Suzy's Sweet and Sour Meatloaf."

Actually, it was pretty good. Very tasty with mashed potatoes.

We've attached a pretty silly video. Probably time to hit the delete when you see it.

The output of the bread machine was not so good. It yielded a loaf that was tough and almost tasteless, although the squirrels in our backyard enjoyed it.

The video is silly but, it's the middle of the winter so that happens.

Colder Than a Witch's T*t

It snowed twice this week but nothing much in terms of accumulation. The second time it snowed, the temperature took a dip from 40 degrees down to about 10 at night. Saturday morning when we arrived at the boat, it was 20 degrees in the sun. No big deal. We can handle that easily. Well, that's what we thought.

The inside of the shed was really cold and even with our little electric heater going, the cabin of the boat was like a deep freeze. We set up the lights and put on our blue plastic gloves with our "fagans" (wool gloves with the ends of the fingers cut off) over them.  Even then, our torque wrench felt like ice. The picture above shows Bill beating on a bottle of dish washing liquid with a wrench. Hard as a rock.

But that's enough complaining.

Our concern was that the rocker arm shafts were torqued down properly. The small block Chrysler engine is unlike the GM small block in that there are no studs on which you mount each rocker arm. Instead, the rocker arms are slid onto a shaft. That shaft bolts down to the head. There are spacers that align the rocker arms properly along that shaft.

The specs calls for the shaft (with five bolts and spacers) be torqued down to 200 inch-lbs. That's 16.6 ft. lbs. and we torqued each side down to very close to that spec.

The next step will be to re-mount the intake manifold. While we were contemplating that, our friend Stu paid a visit. He's the guy who helped us get the heavy parts back up onto the boat two weeks ago. Stu is a GM guy but could see that I was going to have to place the intake manifold back down in exactly the right spot on the gaskets. No sliding around. He volunteered to give us a hand with that delicate move and we're going to take him up on his offer.

The intake manifold gaskets are interesting. Fel Pro's marine intake gasket set for this engine has end gaskets that have a peel-off sticky back. The directions have about 500 words of caution about mounting them, particularly where they overlap the side gaskets. We asked about that on the Chrysler Engine Forum where it was suggested that we also put a very thin film of gasket sealant over both the front and rear gaskets. Apparently, others have had problems sealing the end gaskets so we'll take their advice.

Then there are the side gaskets.

Nice quality, but they show their heritage from Chrysler truck engines. Those metallic pieces in the center of each gasket have to be installed in each gasket, which we did. They are for an exhaust gas crossover that is meant to heat the bottom of the carb and improve combustion, particularly during cold starts. They are completely useless for marine applications. In fact, Fel Pro makes marine intake gasket sets for GM small block engines that block off those passages. Unfortunately, nothing like that for Chrysler small block engines That we've been able to find, so we'll have to use these.

New heads on, finally

It's a good thing that we're familiar with planning because this job has needed a lot of it. Sourcing the parts was fairly easy. Bolts, gaskets, heads, manifolds and sealant were all ordered and delivered, but getting all the heavy stuff (heads, exhaust manifolds) from our house the the boatyard and then getting it all up onto the boat was a new problem.

That last lift from the ground to the swim platform was, frankly, beyond us.

We asked our boating friend, Stu Noelte, (who no longer has a boat but is the art teacher for nearby Portland High School) to give us a hand. He showed up right on time and we lugged the parts from our station wagon to the boat. Amazing how easy it can be for two people.

Now it was time to begin assembling everything.

The last thing to come off was the first to go back on, quite naturally, and that was the heads. We struggled with getting the outboard head in place but eventually did it. The inboard head was a lot easier and we were able to bolt them both down. Torque for each bolt (according the Chrysler) was first, finger tight, then 50 ft.lbs. in a particular sequence, then a final 105 ft.lbs on each of the 20 bolts. (We said 120 ft.lbs on the video but that was wrong).

I think we've forgotten what 105 ft. lbs. really means. That, at least for us, was a big pull, and we'll be sending out for new underwear soon. But, we got it done.

On Sunday, we mounted the rocker arm assemblies. We followed the exact sequence we used in disassembly and every pushrod, rocker arm and bolt is back in its original position. We added Permatex Assembly Lube to every friction point. We also vacuumed out the valley under the intake manifold and soaked up all the oil that was trapped in there. That removed a lot of sediment that we'd just as soon not get into our new heads.

Next up is reinstalling the intake manifold, the last big, heavy engine component, and we'll take a whack at that next weekend.

Good Advice

Before we left our summer slip and knowing that we were going to do this head replacement project over the winter, we asked a good friend if he had any advice. Our dockmate, Ron, took the time to tell us about some things that we'd want to pay careful attention to because he knew a lot about Mopar engines.

Ron crossed the bar in early December and he is missed.

Every time we set a gasket (be careful with certain of them, he told us) or turn in a new bolt (you need all new bolts, just do it, he said) we think of him.

Don't know how much more we can say except thanks. We think of you often, Ron, and will continue to do so for as long as we're around.