We have been polishing off projects and repairs quickly, and are almost ready to go!

It was supposed to be simple…

One of the things we undertook on this maintenance stop was to have the genoa furling gearbox powder coated.  It lives out on the bow of the boat constantly in salt spray and the finish was getting very rough.  To protect it from further corrosion and keep it looking “yacht-y” we decided to have it powder coated.  I looked for a local shop, and I found a powder coat shop associated with a machine shop.  A perfect combination, I thought, in case there are problems getting the thing apart. I am going to make a very long story very short, and say it was a mess, and nearly a disaster.

In a way I was lucky: The shop reassembled things with one part rotated from where it needed to be.  When I took that off to get it oriented correctly I saw the main thrust bearing…dry. No grease. And it wouldn’t turn.  Hmmm….

The more I looked the more messed up things were.  Seals looked like they had been installed by a blindfolded chimpanzee.  Powder coat on bearing races.  Power coat in o-ring grooves.  Things put in backwards. Moving parts not lubricated. It was a mess. If I had installed it as it was delivered to me the whole thing would have self destructed in days of use.

After a day and a half of re-work we got it back to serviceable condition, ready to furl our sail for years to come.

It is always true… NOBODY cares as much about your boat as you do.

Go get a left-handed monkey wrench.

In any sequence of projects, sometimes it seems you get into the “two step forward, one back” mode.  In what I hope is our last “step backward” I discovered a serious leak on our main engine raw water pump.  After rebuilding the pump, reinstalling it was a different kind of challenge..

In the engine service manual the engine maker specifies a special tool to align the pump with the camshaft. Turns out the manufacturer never actually made the tool. It is a phantom of the manual writer’s imagination. Hence this pump has a bad reputation of having a short life and wearing out in odd ways because people do not understand the importance of careful alignment, and even if they do understand, there is no way to actually do it!

To solve the problem, I had the machine shop here at the yard make the alignment tool for me.  So now I have a rebuilt pump, installed correctly, and the tool to do it right in the future. Hopefully good for a while!

And the End Approaches.

We have a day or two of work here, and then we are off as soon as the weather cooperates.  Less than 2 weeks later than we expected.  Not too bad, in retrospect.