Boat Pics

[petermarcus]

I wish I had a pic of the boat when I first dragged it from under the tree. One of the tires on the trailer had sunk into the sand up to its rim, and when I pulled it out, the rubber had disintegrated and I had to get a new tire.

Here's the engine after being dunked mostly underwater a couple years before.

Comments

[billijean]

omg. that stresses me out. I'd never get that all back together.

The frog/toad skeleton is way cool :)

[petermarcus]

I took 134 pictures of me taking the engine apart. I had shop manuals and such with a lot of diagrams, but those pictures helped more than anything else.

[billijean]

Ah. Well. I wouldn't do that. I'd jump in and make a mess and then go, Oh shit. Or, I'd be organised and document and then M would "Clean up" and yeah.

But you are very clever (not that we didn't already know that). :)

[petermarcus]

Thomas Edison used to take things apart to see what made them tick (including, ironically, watches), and he always put all the parts on his table in the order in which he took them apart, so he could always reverse it. I tried to do the same. Then, over the course of the year, with garages always being in a state of flux, everything got shuffled. But! I took pics!

[gravity]

It is really an amazing amount of work that you have done and that you have left to do. I am looking forward to riding in that boat one day.

[petermarcus]

Thanks! You're one of the ones who saw it in person, in progress. I'll know this boat inside and out (literally, including the engine) when it's done.

[beckmermaid]

Wow! What a job! I can't wait to see the finished product :) Your determination is admirable- I surely would have abandoned "ship" and either started a new project or declared myself unfit for such a job ;) Which, is the case anyway...

[petermarcus]

I'd bet you'd be a lot like Christey. I look at things from an engineering perspective -- i.e. what does this part actually do? She looks at some of this stuff like a spatial orientation thing -- where does this part fit? If you took it apart yourself (and took a lot of pics), it's amazing how much of it makes sense.

[minouette]

could be a lot worse... that's great though that the salt water didn't get in and the end product looks impressive

[petermarcus]

I've worked on worse! I had a bigger boat I redecked out in St Pete Beach, but just when I had it almost done (and at least usable), it got swamped by Hurricane Jeanne and was a loss. The bilge pump wires snapped when the boat hit a couple bad waves (I assume), so water buried the engine...with the battery still above water and still attached to the starter and grounded to the block. The water damage was small, but the battery drained into the salt water and the galvanic difference between the copper windings in the starter motor and the cast iron block just corroded the starter to the engine, and ate right through the block.

[minouette]

Yeah, that would do it! I've seen some marine geophysical electronics which has been exposed to seawater... it's very sad, and smells awful. Shorted batteries in more-or-less sealed pressure vessels are pretty dangerous too. I spend a lot of my time trying to prevent electrolytic currents through salt water... and the rest of the time trying to create them - ha!