In progress...
A warm and sunny long weekend gave us lots of opportunities to get work done around the boat!
Saturday involved lots more angle grinding on the deck (and the realisation that we could get twice as much done with a second angle grinder), a trip to the wood merchants to collect the beautiful oak and mahogany-a-like tongue and groove for the back wall of our captain’s cabin bedroom, the purchase of a second angle grinder at B&Q, and finally a bunch of patch painting on the deck and our first coat of grippy paint onto the gunnel where we regularly step aboard.
Then Sunday and Monday we attacked the shower off the saloon. Nikolaj had to rip off a portion of the wall when he was connecting the new hot water supply, and rebuilding it wasn’t very high on our priority list while we had the captain’s cabin shower to get clean in. But not being able to shower at low tide (due to the angle of the outflow from that shower being ever-so-slightly uphill when we’re settled) is getting very tedious when it coincides with that time between waking up and leaving for work, so we’re pushing ahead to make this other shower watertight…
We ran out of primer to finish that up and start tiling, but hopefully that will be done awfully soon. We very luckily discovered a spare pack of tiles in the hold, so at least it’ll match, but beyond that we’re not too fussed how it looks as this will all get ripped out in 5-10 years’ time when we rip out all the tiny toilet cubicles and make one big über bathroom for ourselves…
There should be more progress reports soon, since both of us are taking the day off tomorrow to grind down more spots on the deck while the weather’s so nice. We have to take advantage of the nice weather while we have it!
All hands on deck
Finally, a nice warm, sunny Saturday! We checked the forecast and got up early to start attacking the deck before quiet hours came into force at 1pm on Saturdays (no noise allowed at all on Sundays!).
Our initial treatment of the deck involves three steps:
- Using an angle grinder to take any rust spots back to the bare metal
- Using a wire brush attachment on a drill to exfoliate off any loose paint chips, and
- Painting over the bare metal spots with red oxide to prevent rust until the big paint job
I’m happy to say that, since he was a guest, Alex took the most fun angle grinding job, I got the wire brushing, and James was left to sweep away the considerable green dust and paint after us.
It was all going well until we smelt electrons… and realised we’d completely killed the angle grinder! So the boys went off to Machine Mart to buy a new one for next time, and I used the last hour of “noisy hours” to sand down the window frames on the Captain’s Cabin and stain/varnish them back into some semblance of health.
But neither the day nor the sunshine was over by the time they got back, so James went about dismantling the copper pipes from the old LPG installation (Calor Force are very happy to work on boats, fyi! They even have guys trained up on BSS regulations, which floored me…) in order to sell them for scrap. Our last lot of copper pipes from the old hot water system earned us a cool £50 so we hold onto every scrap now. You can also see James’s red oxide deck patching in the foreground, so the areas that were just wire brushed aren’t nearly as obvious.
James and Alex also thought ahead and bought supplies for next weekend’s project, realising that the only environment more hostile than our fenders is B&Q on a bank holiday Saturday… When Nikolaj was piping in our hot water supply, he had to remove a portion of the starboard toilet’s shower wall, so we’ve got the supplies to rebuild the wall and tile it over again.
A shower at low tide? What a luxury…
Back in action
It must be the hint of Spring in the air, because we got more accomplished this weekend than we have in the last 6 months combined.
Saturday began early with a bit of art terrorism for James and some giant fender maintenance for Melissa, and then followed a massive quarterly shop at Costco to stock up for the charity dinners. We also made a whirlwind shop through B&Q (for some mains electrical bits to enhance the captain’s cabin) and Ikea (for some baskets for the captain’s cabin bedroom’s new shelf and a stepstool). We were no sooner back home for an hour before we were called in to help push-start a neighbour’s car (success!) and we finished up the various household duties (recycling, rubbish, cleaning, the loads of laundry – the usual) before collapsing into bed.
Sunday began with another early start, where we collectively accomplished the following:
- tied up the errant live electrical cables in the hold so we could then pry up the rest of the floor to patch the (yet again) leaking water tank
- cleaned out the filter on our water pump (better the debris be in there than in our glasses!)
- stained and assembled our new stepladder, intended for access to the wheelhouse from the captain’s cabin entranceway
- cleaned out the captain’s cabin fridge, because it was beginning to reek
- tidied the half-height storage area under the wheelhouse, and moved the patio furniture to the calorifier cabinet instead
- assembled the boxes for the captain’s cabin bedroom and transferred our smalls inside, and removed the rolling drawers to the other side
- removed the ugly motion sensor in the captain’s cabin saloon
- attempted to create a new coax extension to place the TV aerial in the wheelhouse (unfinished)
- cooked an excellent meal and Melissa also sewed up a new shirt
We’ve really only got the galley steps as the last big task still on our list so hopefully we’ll have a pretty relaxing few weekends ahead of us!
Diesel do nicely
I won’t lie; hooking up the diesel stove was a long and tricky process that wasn’t over even when we thought it was over, nor the two times after that we thought it was over. We almost got blown up once and gassed twice to boot. And more than once the bottle of meths we keep to light it has started to look like the only way of keeping warm. But finally it’s up and running and it looks like this:
Even just getting it lit the first time seemed impossible. To even get to that point we had to re-route the flue which came up behind the old wheelhouse – now conveniently placed under a walkway which we nearly cut through but ended up putting a cartoon-style kink in the chimney instead. We had to trace back the old stove’s diesel line only to discover it came up right next to the hot flue – and the batteries! So instead we installed a pump in the engine room (and of course, the pump is 12 volts and our DC system is 24 volts so there’s a bodged-up voltage dropper feeding it) and ran new pipework. Which leaked time and time again and I spent a very frustrating New Year’s Eve trying to replace a foot long stretch of pipe that had kinked. But now the occasional satisfied clonk of the pump indicates that diesel is dripping into the pan.
Let me explain how diesel stoves work, in the hope of saving some other diesel neophyte’s arm hair. Liquid diesel doesn’t burn so it has to be persuaded to evaporate in a wide pan at the bottom of the stove. To do this you pour in a bit of pure alcohol and light it. The alcohol burns for a minute or two and warms the pan up to the point where the diesel vaporises and starts to burn on its own. After a few more minutes the diesel is keeping everything warm enough and the stove self-sustains. Once the stove is warm enough a temperature probe opens a valve in the regulator to let diesel drip feed into the pan – before this point you have to hold down a lever to bypass the valve and let diesel in at maximum flow. In normal use the stove uses hardly any diesel so this lever can let rather a lot of diesel into the pan before the stove is self-sustaining. Working out how long to hold it down for is an art, not a science. Once the stove is lit, air for the flame is supplied using a tilting hatch at the back with a little counterweight to keep it not too open, not too closed. Too open and too much air gets in, the flame burns bright yellow and deposits soot everywhere. Too little and the diesel can’t burn properly and the stove becomes unsustainable.
What you definitely don’t want to do is leave the regulator open and hold the lever down to check for leaks, then try to light the stove with whatever you find in your plumbing kit with a ‘highly flammable’ warning label on it. And you especially don’t want to do all this with the hatch wide open, because the combined effect is to massively overlight the stove, fill the room with smoke and cause a huge roaring cone of flame to threaten to blow the whole thing to smithereens. Instead, soak up any excess diesel with a kitchen towel, use methylated spirit (not white spirit!) and expect to have to turn the stove off, wait for it to cool down, and readjust the hatch several times before the flame burns properly. And expect the cat to act stoned from the smoke. Although the level of camp when we tried to wrap my niece’s Christmas present can’t be attributed to the same.
So with the stove keeping us warm (when we remember to keep the diesel tank topped up) the captain’s cabin is feeling quite the cosy home. Except for the old shelf which was exactly at head-cracking height above the sofa. The old owners weren’t exactly beanpoles but surely they must have found it as uncomfortable as we did?
A couple of brackets and a few minutes work with my second-favourite toy, the power saw, plus a quick run to B&Q for a spirit level, and we’d saved our skulls and created a Bosco-proof top shelf for precious things.
However if you’ve never seen a cat look miserable, I recommend you take down the shelf that lets him run up and down in front of the windows getting the only view of the outside world that he can because he’s too much of a wimp to go outside. He looked so unhappy that I dug out another bracket and made a kitty perch:
I need to tidy up the edges and varnish where I’ve cut, but finally we can watch telly without causing irreparable curvature of the spine. Ha, I made it sound like we have time to watch telly.
Copper Cabana
The heat situation isn’t much better, I’m afraid, but we are making progress. Last Friday Nikolaj took the whole day to hook up the old, existing radiator (plus a tiny quarter-sized radiator the size of two sheets of paper) in the saloon to the new boiler. Flipping the switch suddenly caused boiling, black water to spurt from two pipes in the old hotel rooms! So the pipes that we thought did nothing but feed the (ripped out) sinks apparently were for a heating system that was never actually installed… So after cutting out the leaking sections of pipe and popping in new HEP20, we had the radiators on for exactly five minutes before the connection to the big radiator did a hot, black, geyser interpretation and then the radiator itself started to bubble up on the front panel (as a leak pushed pressurized water out, bubbling up the special paint. So we’re still without heat in the saloon. It looks like we’ll need to rip out ALL the pipework in the saloon and hotel rooms as well as replace the radiators. But since Nikolaj’s already done the difficult stuff, we should be able to do this on our own (famous last words).
Instead, we turned our focus on installing our new shiny Kabola diesel stove. James had to work on Saturday so it was down to me to create the new fuel line from the big tank in the engine room up to the captain’s cabin fireplace. We were going to go down through the floor and then along the ceiling of the engine room, but after drilling through the floor, it transpired that there’s a 4 inch gap between the floor of the captain’s cabin and the ceiling of the engine room. Which is too deep for a drill for me to be able to mark my place down below. So that was scrapped, instead opting to take the line from the fireplace, over the shower door and through the bulkhead behind the stairs down into the captain’s cabin, where a small hole for an (unused) coax aerial cable already existed. After 15-20 minutes with the hammer drill, a giant drill bit, and a whole ton of muscle power, the hole was big enough to take a gland with a hole for our 8mm fuel pipe inside. The gland makes the hole nice and air- and water-tight and also cushions our little pipe from any jagged steel.
I then had to wrestle the 5m of copper pipe (with a mind of its own) from the tank, up the rib, along the wall, behind the boiler flue, through a hole in a rib, then into the gland, along the wall, up above the shower door, through another hole in the wall, down the wall, around the marble fireplace edge, and into the new stove. I had to bend it all by hand (until the pipe bender arrived to do the real sharp angles), and put fasteners every few feet to keep it all tacked down. James got busy on arranging the voltage droppers for our 12v fuel pump, which we’ll hopefully get to hook up tonight.
The other part of the installation is to make a path for the flue, since the previous owners never used it after they raised the wheelhouse. We know this because they built a battery shelf and the walkways to the wheelhouse entrance directly above it. Thanks!
Earlier this week I did some very tedious measuring with numb fingers to mark the point directly above the flue so Nikolaj can enlarge it to 80mm with his plasma cutter. On Saturday I drilled a hole at this point so the plasma cutter has an edge to start from using a regular ol’ drill and a metal bit, which took way more muscle power than I was expecting. Of course it rained overnight so we now have a nice rusty hole!
On James’s epic trip to Maplin’s he also picked up two extended lengths of cabling so we can move the two right-most batteries down underneath the battery shelf to make way for the flue. Let’s hope we can do it without creating a mess of sparks this time, as there’s no 24v isolator and those puppies are now fully topped up…
Newest hotness
Our new diesel stove for the captain’s cabin arrived while we were over alongside the drydock last week, but we were finally able to bring it inside a few days ago when we got our regular access back. It’s a Kabola Old Dutch, and almost identical to the one that was back there before, only it’s a) not a rusting shell, and b) it actually works. It’s also about four times more fuel efficient and has a nice guard rail so our stews don’t slide off, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the same stove.
We were hoping this meant we could just reuse the old diesel line and flue from the old stove that are still in the fireplace, but on closer inspection it looks like the old diesel line leads to…. nowhere, and the old flue ends up in an enclosed space under the battery cupboard by the wheelhouse steps. So the previously owners clearly never used that stove at all, which fits into our knowledge of the kanotel being summer-only, and that old stove being reeeeeally old. We were going to rig up a temporary solution with a tiny diesel tank in another cupboard on deck to get the gravity feed, but it turns out that that would be nearly as much work as just making the permanent connection into our main diesel tank in the engine room. But because the engine room is under the captain’s cabin, we’ll need to buy a £100 fuel pump to counter gravity. And that flue is going to need either two elbow bends or a bit of flexible flue to be able to clear the battery cabinet and vent properly, which is going to be another project.
So even though we’ve got our beautiful new stove, there’s still a fair amount of work involved before we can stop suckling at the electric space heater teet and get the captain’s cabin really nice and cozy.
You may be asking yourself “Why don’t they just use the massive boiler that was just installed?”. Well, you, that’s a good question. The main reason is that our captain’s cabin is gorgeous and art deco with a lovely marble fireplace and original woodwork and stained glass, and radiators only come in two styles: neo-Victorian, and ultra-modern. Which will be fine for heating the main part of the boat, but would look hideous in the captain’s cabin fireplace. And even if we didn’t care about aesthetics (which we do), it’s be just as much work and expense to plumb in new radiators as it would to get the stove in, and this way we’ve got another layer of backup if something should fail.
Steamboat Hendrik
(Yes, we finally have hot water!)
A Hopper, Skip, and a Pump
(Or is it just in my dad’s world that “hopper” = toilet?)
One major accomplishment James failed to relate in the last update is that our new toilets are now fitted and operational! We had a wide variety of marine toilets to choose from (all with equally amusing names), but to be fair I can’t actually recall which ones we settled on. In any case, they work beautifully and we can now flush toilet paper instead of binning it (ewww!) and they actually do flush, unlike my mom’s horrible experience with the pump-type toilets on our Greek sailing holiday a few years back.
In fact, the toilet control panel we bought is complex enough even with just two buttons to surely mystify guests. We thought that the two buttons would be Big Flush/Little Flush like on European toilets, but when they arrived, we were confused to find the buttons labelled “Before Use” and “After Use”. Hitting the “Before Use” button before #2s fills the bowl so you don’t have the German shelf toilet issues, and the “After Use” button just flushes as you’d expect. Only about 10-15 seconds after flushing, it sends another blast down the pipes which gives you a hearty jolt if you happen to be slow at doing up your fly. Bwahahah!
In skip (translate: dumpster) news: we’re finished! Hurrah! The deck is clear again apart from the plumbing equipment Nikolaj’s still using to finish up the heating, plus the few bits of kit we’re planning on eBaying. So hopefully the skip itself will even be off our deck in a few days’ time…
In pump news: we’re slowly getting used to the eccentricities of our water system and becoming pitch-perfect at detecting the different noises various pumps make. The geyser problem is being averted by filling little and often (once a week or so) until we can get a robust patch, and our water pressure is good in all areas of the boat.
Our new diesel stove for the Captain’s Cabin has been ordered and should arrive in a week or two (now being an extremely popular time of year to buy heaters!). This is replacing the extremely knackered diesel stove that’s already back there, nestled in the marble and tiled fireplace, and is the same dimensions and shape as the one it’s replacing (only it works, and has eons better fuel efficiency!). We could’ve hooked up a radiator from the big system Nikolaj’s installing, but no one makes any that look nice enough to place in a fireplace, so we figured we might as well get something nice enough to keep back there even after the sprucing up. And in the case of its eventual renting, we can keep tabs on how much fuel the lodger uses as it’s on a separate system.
And finally, some photos of the “dancefloor” from our party. The only rooms remaining are the first single rooms by the saloon, and as you walk from the saloon to the front of the boat, rooms 2 and 3 on the left, preserved for the winter as James’s wardrobe and my sewing room, respectively. They, too, will go at some point, but we’ve got to take the rest of the hold down to the bare metal before that point…
(both views are looking towards the front of the boat)
It feels huge down there, which is really exciting as we walk out where the walls for our lounge, bedrooms, and en suites will be!
Haven't we been here before?
This story is becoming too familiar now. Since Nikolaj installed the balancing pipe last week we’ve been playing with the water flow, trying to find the right amount of water to hold in the tanks so that we get a decent supply but the tanks don’t crack again.
Trouble is, our tanks are something of a blunt force instrument. We only know when they’re full because the fibreglass begins to bulge upward and lifts a little copper pipe pushed through a hole in the floor. Of course they only bulge upwards when they’re full, and if you fill them when they’re level the port side tanks get a rush of water when we settle and there are a million other reasons why it’s bloody difficult to tell exactly how much water is actually in there already.
Which is how I came face-to-face with a geyser in the storage hold tonight. The force of water had cracked my original repair wide open and there was a six-inch fountain gushing into the bilge. And for once I definitely didn’t say any bad words because I was too busy running to grab the little submersible pump which is fortunately still aboard and shouting to Melissa to yank the hose out of the filler.
Funny thing is, despite the situation looking far worse than last time, we’re actually in much better shape. Because we now have a working pump we were able to open a couple of taps and relieve the pressure on the tanks far quicker than last time, where we were forced to let it trickle out for days on end. The sand beneath the tanks isn’t even waterlogged yet, although I’m hoping when we settle at low tide enough water will settle out that we can pump it clear. In the meantime we’re sat twiddling our thumbs, so I took the opportunity to hack a fortnight’s beard growth off my face. Got to love a crisis that gives you time to shave.
He must be great at Tetris
I can barely get a crab croquette into my mouth with a pair of chopsticks so I was put to shame yesterday by the guy from Tidy Thames who craned a skip onto our deck. A ton of skip hanging from a couple of chains on one moving barge being dropped onto the deck of another moving barge, what could go wrong?
Fortunately, nothing. Trouble is, compared to the amount of crap we have on deck, the skip is starting to look very small. Three or four loads too small, in fact. And we don’t have all that long to toss the remaining partition walls out before we need that space.