So many boat projects are two steps forward and one back. Today was definitely one of those steps back.

While the boat is on the hard is always a good chance to get hands and eyes into places you don’t always have time or access to. During our poking around, I found that the exhaust elbow on our generator was leaking salt water. Not a big deal. There is actually a local supplier here who keeps a good supply of WhisperPower spare parts, We gave them $400, they gave us a brand new exhaust elbow. My expectation was that I would have that installed in a an hour or two of work this morning, and then be off to other projects. Ha!

I was tightening the nuts to clamp it in place using my torque wrench because this is important to get right. I was coming up on the final last bit of turn when suddenly the nut got a lot easier to turn. That’s never good. Turns out I pulled the stud right out of the aluminum exhaust manifold. Argh…

It’s not too big a job to pull the manifold off this tiny little engine, so off it came. Since I have it in hand, I took it apart checking on things. It always kind of struck me as odd that this was assembled with multiple metals but no sacrificial zinc anode to protect them from corrosion. I put it down to some magical Dutch engineering at the manufacturer. Turns out I was wrong… There WAS a zinc. Normally these would be replaced every 6 months or so, but I had never done it because they never mentioned that it was there in the maintenance schedule.

After cleaning this up and making it all as good as can be, I basdically ended up at the end of the day, and I have a few more small parts and tools arriving on Monday that I need to finish it up. We’re scheduled to launch on Friday… Time to prioritize projects to be sure I get all the ones done that much be done before we go back in the water!