6 February, 2000
Another weekend, another couple of projects. Saturday, while it was raining and blowing outside, I rewired a few outlets inside (below). I finished dressing and securing the cable to the new power strip under the chart table and plugged the DSL power brick into it (works great, one less thing to bang with my hip in the galley). There was (yet) another mystery wire. This time under the basin in the galley. My guess is that it is a continuation of the faux DC socket next to the electrical panel. That is, someone wired DC power to standard AC house sockets. God knows why. It seems that one of the previous owners did a really crappy job on wiring the boat. Jim, the owner before me did an okay job of redoing the glaring safety hazards, but opted to leave wires in place, "just in case." This has turned out to be a pain since we find wires that terminate with ring terminals (or bare wire), and we don't know where they originate. Or we find wires buried behind the electrical panel, with no label and no apparent use. We have a standing order now: Any unterminated wires with no apparent function are to be summarily removed, as soon as, and if at all, possible. It turns out to be much easier to run new wire where you want it than trying to cobble together some 10 year legacy junk of questionable origin.
I couldn't get this particular beast out, but I clipped it back out of the way. It takes a dog leg under the chart table, so removal will require pulling a lot of stuff out from several compartments. I'll save this for another day.
I did a few upgrades elsewhere on the AC circuit: Replaced the duplex socket behind the microwave with a switch/socket combination. This is so we can turn off the microwave when we're living on invertor power. The microwave has a clock that draws some juice and the invertor will sense that and never go into low power idle mode. This was also my first electrical project on the boat and it shows, since I didn't use any terminals, just bare stranded wire connected to the socket. At least both the wire and socket are marine grade (Ancor). Now all the connections are nicely terminated with insulated ring terminals. I then took the nice duplex socket and used that to replace the junky single socket that's up in the forward cabin. Crimping 10 gauge wire, even with the nice ratcheting tool Dad got me for Christmas, is a bitch. Of course, the cutout was made just big enough for the single socket, so I had about an hour of quality time with a worklight, the vacuum cleaner and the Dremel tool.
In the middle of all this, I invited Suzy back to the boat for lunch. Big mistake. The boat was a wreck. The AC system was offline, so no heat, and no microwave. She ended up scarfing down a couple of uncooked microwave burritos. Sorry about that, hon. I'll try to think ahead a bit more next time.
Today, Sunday, we got a up a little late. It is our only joint day off of the week, so I felt justified in not getting up before 9. Or maybe it was 10. Whatever. Today was also the first day the Sun has shone bright and warm in perhaps a week. If you've been reading the logs, you know that we've had a few leaks to deal with. I am still researching the chainplate problem, but there's also the port, aft gate stanchion (strategically located over the electrical panel). So, after coffee, bagel and some debate, we got to work on it. When we were installing the refurbished stanchions, we had to tap threads (and sometimes redrill first) for screws to hold them down. I broke the tap inside this particular stanchion, couldn't get the broken piece out and couldn't even remove the piece from the boat (note for future reference, never try to tap a hole while it is vertical and still installed). Once we got one of the bases off, it unloaded the stanchion enough so I could remove it. A few aggression therapy whacks with a hammer and punch and the tip of the old tap was history.
We started removing the forward stanchion screws, (and there are 5 of them, 3 through the deck and 2 smaller ones in the toerail), but the toerail screws just started spinning. The nuts on the back of these bolts are way out of reach, I have no idea how they were installed in the first place, unless the guys fingers were reminiscent of E.T. After some investigation we discovered that we were working on the wrong stanchion base (there are two for each gate stanchion). So we repeated the process on the after base. The toerail screws also started to spin, but we managed to get wrench around them. We had to use a pair of long handled hemostats, a flashlight and a mirror to reattach them.
When we got the bolts of the stanchion base, we were horrified to discover that instead of bedding compound, someone had used epoxy instead. The stuff had yellowed and cracked (epoxy does not have good UV resistance) and it was at an odd angle to the deck. What a mess. Suzy got out the sander and smoothed it down some, while I worked below on cleaning up the backing plate and other mess. It looked like the plate had been glassed into the decking.
We smeared a good deal of FastTack onto the cleaned up deck and starting bolting things back together. One good thing we found was that there was no exposed wood coring. I assume that it had been closed up when the epoxy "bedding" was done. A bad thing is that the hole is so tight that it has threads. The deck is actually acting like a nut,holding the hardware down. That means that we have to twist the bolts tomorrow, once the sealant has cured and is ready to be compressed, in order to tighten the part. The twisting action will break that nice seal we're working so hard to maintain, so we'll have to smear some more goop on the threads before we're finished.
That's it for the day. My knee has started to swell up from crawling around (almost as much as Suzy's knuckle). I'm on beer and ibuprofin for the evening.
Copyright © 2000 Ken Mayer