Breaking All the Rules ...

[fjwiley1]

Homeless your 4-236 looks really good. The water header tank on my 4-236 had started to corrode under the paint. Fortunately I discovered/ repaired before they caused some troubling "pin holes"....they are very reliable engines.


Life is good if you KeepaSmilin......




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[Warby12]

[Cadence]

Originally Posted by homeless

Pictures of engine before/after cleanup.

Thanks for the pics. Looks like a great job. The rust hasn't been painted over as you see so often in pics of boats for sale.

[Spinmonkey]

Re the mozzies mate, go and get yourself a 12v bug drowner, has a ultra violet fluoro lamp and low draw fan to suck them into the water, we mount ours on the bow when anchored in swampy spots, works great


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[homeless]

After telling me that my Perkins parts would need to be ordered from Singapore and the UK since there was no stock in Australia the Australian distributor hasn't bothered to answer my emails to confirm freight costs so I can actually pay them. So ... since I am already in Singapore I dropped in to the office of the Perkins distributor here and picked up a set of 3 crank shaft bolts. They were extremely helpful and gave good service even for a very small sale like mine.

The only remaining parts I need to complete the engine assembly are some gaskets and a steel fuel line which I believe I can make myself or get manufactured in Australia at a competitive price, so the Australian Perkins distributor will hopefully not be getting another cent from me after wasting so much of my time. If I do need Perkins parts in future I will try to use distributors in Singapore or the UK rather than Australia.

I have been constantly disappointed with service from distributors in Australia including Perkins, Hempel, Simrad, and Raymarine. I could have saved many weeks of frustration if I had dealt with distributors outside Australia via the internet. Ebay and West Marine will be getting more money from me in future.

[HappyMdRSailor]

Originally Posted by homeless

I have been constantly disappointed with service from distributors in Australia including Perkins, Hempel, Simrad, and Raymarine. I could have saved many weeks of frustration if I had dealt with distributors outside Australia via the internet. Ebay and West Marine will be getting more money from me in future.

Welcome to boat ownership.... Very few major manufacturers make it easy to get parts...

[homeless]

Back on the boat today.

The good news ... the painting contractor did complete the barrier coat on the hull, so it is now ready for antifoul. Still considering whether to do it myself or pay them to do it.

The bad news ... the rigging contractor was supposed to lift the mast today, but took too long to prep the mast for the lift and decided to delay the crane until tomorrow morning. While dropping the genoa they let go the halyard and it and the sail came crashing down. I was a bit upset to see my new $5000 sail sitting in the dirt half on and half off the boat, but even more upset that the fall cracked the furler. Will be interesting to see if new parts can be sourced for the old furler and who pay ...

[nagrom snoyl]

Welcome back homeless looking forward to hearing how the rest of your refit goes!

[Exile]

Originally Posted by nagrom snoyl

Welcome back homeless looking forward to hearing how the rest of your refit goes!

[homeless]

The crane turned up at 7:30am and the mast was lifted without problems, though quite a bit of water was released into the bilge, and the high tide mark inside the mast indicates the lower 2 meters were full of water. I mentioned before I had concerns about corrosion at the mast base because the aluminium mast base was sitting in a stainless steel shoe. There is severe pitting around the bottom of the mast base, and it has been decided to reinforce it and replace the stainless steel shoe with an aluminium plug and add additional drain holes. When removing the stainless steel shoe 3 out of 5 stainless steel bolts into the lower aluminium plate sheared off, so that was another potential source of problems if they had sheared off at sea and the mast base had slid off the step ... punched though the hull ... lost the rigging ... and sunk the boat.

Work to complete the engine rebuild continues. I did try to get gaskets for the water pump and oil filter mount from the Perkins distributors in Australia and Singapore, but the answer kept coming back to "not in stock ... suggest you make them yourself". Today I bought some gasket paper (more like card board) and made the missing gaskets. At $22 it is most definitely the most expensive paper I have ever bought, so I will need to read up on why it is so special.

Tomorrow I will mount the alternator, and the engine rebuild is complete. Unfortunately while I was away from the boat last week my BIG bucket disappeared (storm wind ?, yard cleanup ?) so I will need to buy another for the raw water pickup before I can test start the engine.

[homeless]

Today I dropped the old 10 man liferaft off at RFD for them to quote on service cost. It may take a few weeks before they get time to open the case and send me a quote. And the newspapers say the Australian economy is slowing down !!! Depending on what cost they come back with it may end up cheaper to buy a new 4 man raft than service the old 10 man. Personally I don't need a liferaft, as I would prefer the kayak, but if I ever want to get the wife and son on the boat it is a necessary expense to get it back to a reliable state.

The engine assembly is now complete and I have started double checking. Found that the new fuel hose I had made up does not seat properly as it is a normally threaded hose connector and the mount that it is supposed to attach to is tapered. Will need to go back to Enzed tomorrow and see what they suggest.

I cleaned up the mast step corrosion and through-deck fitting.

While the main sail is off the boom I thought it is a good opportunity to get a new lazy bag made, as mine is greenish with lichen, patched, and disintegrating. I emailed 3 local canvas suppliers and one did not reply, one told me they were too busy and did not want more work, and the third came back with a quote for over $1000 !!! After the usual cash discount I got it down to $920, but it is still enough for me to think twice. Tell your children not bother studying medicine or law, and buy them an industrial sewing machine instead.

[KASHMIR]

I would have just dumped the liferaft, they are much cheaper now and when the older units are a few years the material degrades and they leak. My wife did a sea safety a couple of years ago and the sample raft was nearing the end of its survey and it blew up and then went down because of leaks, 3 months till survey expired. He threw it away and bought a new one.

[Kalinka1]

Have been reading this from the beginning. Great job. If you haven't put the mast back in? What I did with mine was to epoxie it for about 16 inches up from the base both inside and out. haven't had any problems with corrosion since. what is the make of your furler?

[NSboatman]

you go Homeless- you're doin it right.

Hear you on the raft thing. I sailed for 15 years before kids, mostly bluewater transits to get my own boat to do local charter stuff on other boats; and unless the boat I was delivering had a raft already, I always planned on using the dink as my escape pod. It was usually my girlfriend (now wife) and I only anyway. We setup the dink with dry bags of gear, custom shelter tarps etc... but never got to test it in anger. I'm not really sure if it would have worked well or not - The tarps didn't really seal aroud teh edges, the dry bags would have gotten tossed around a lot and I'm not sure they would have stayed in the boat even with ties; and I was worried about being tossed out in a capsize. but I was convinced then that our solution was cheaper and better than any liferaft. It could be inspected, updated, fiddled with etc any time, and as long as we had time to get it in the water we would be ok I thought.

Now, with 3 kids under 10 and she and I not quite as invincible as in previous years, I've had some recurring nightmares of standing on a sloping, awash, deck, tearfully apologizing to my children for being so damn cheap as to not buy a good, enclosed form of emergency floating shelter. It's not a nice scene.

There is a lot to consider around the liferaft issue (and a lot of digital ink has been spilled on it in this forum especially), but times have changed a lot since much of it was written. Even a relatively poorly equipped mini-budget cruiser will have a PLB these days (or they're nuts). This combined with incredible service from SAR resources and AMVER vessels means that unless you're doing high latitude stuff, the days of spending a week in a liferaft or dinghy are over. Still - it's the first 12-36 hours where most folks will die if they have to get off the mother ship - so some form of immediate and reliable shelter is critical.

For that, it's pretty hard to do better than modern liferaft. Yep, they suck to ride in (been there, but only in training). Yep, most folks will get sick, and yep they are freaking expensive (but getting better). but to be honest, when the **** is hitting the fan and you've got 3 pairs of small, terrified eyes (never mind your own!) to look after, it's pretty hard to beat a "pull the cord and climb in" possibility.

enjoying your thread mate - inspirational and straight up without BS.

[homeless]

Originally Posted by Kalinka1

Have been reading this from the beginning. Great job. If you haven't put the mast back in? What I did with mine was to epoxie it for about 16 inches up from the base both inside and out. haven't had any problems with corrosion since. what is the make of your furler?

I believe the cracked furler is Furlex.

I will think about painting the mast base, but damaged paint can be a source of corrosion. Replacing the stainless shoe with an aluminium plug and putting in a few drain holes should at least slow down the corrosion. At the moment the plan is to rivet and glue a 5 mm sheet around the outside up about 300mm (corrosion is only up about 80mm)