Work, work, is it all about work?

So the last few days were spent working on the boat… yes, i keep going…
Painting, rust banging, sorting out supplies, shapping steel, welding… that’s my lot…

Here are a few pictures :

Okay, that’s it.

Opening the water tank

So, i’ve been slacking a bit on the updates…
Some old though, same old… sitting on the boat by myself, working hard… luckily some friends drop by now and then for a drink or to drag me away to a party, otherwise the yard is empty, only sailboats for sale and megayachts in storage… i’m on my own…

The rust in the bilge is all gone, tomorrow i will apply the second coat of epoxi primer to the only bit that only have one coat, and then leave it like that until i get some help to apply several coats of finish paint. I took away buckets of rust flakes, it’s been quite a job. I still have to do the engine room though…

But for now i moved on to the lid of the water tank, and the water tank itself. There was a really bad spot under one of the seat under the hatch, where wood kept the moisture close to the metal.

Rust had eaten away large chunks, i had to cut a significant piece out.

I also made an openings into the main water tank, as the original one was badly designed and half the saloon had to be dismantled in order to open the tank. So the plasma cutter did a great job of it…

I found the inside of the tank to be worse than i had hoped for. It hasn’t been opened in probably 35 years, and the paint has suffered, and there is even some rust. So now i have to spend some time inside of the tank to clean it all and repaint it. It is going to be a pleasure… i’m lucky i’m not a big guy…

I’m also going to need to locate some steel to make a lid to the new opening, and also a fitting to make a new filling inlet, but i guess that will have to wait until the end of the holiday.

Otherwise for those interested in fixing crappy old boats and sailing by the skin of your teeth, i recomend this little video:

http://vimeo.com/m/15351476

FIRE!

Yes, i put the boat on fire today… it is all fine, no damage, but that was really scary…
I managed to get the plasma cutter to work, and i was playing with it, doing useful and not so useful things with it,

and while cutting a pipe in the bilge, sparks dropped down the pipe and landed inside the engine room… the gooey oily slush on the floor caught fire and before i could open the door of the engine room i had two foot flames spreading to the insulation foam. I eructed a stream of expletives, tried to pour water on it, saw it didn’t do shit, grabbed the fire extinguisher i had kept handy, and nuked the bastard in half a second… good to know the fire extinguisher works, but quite an adrenaline filled moment…
So now i have a mess of white powder in the engine room, but at least the fuel lines did not explode…

Otherwise i tried to work hard today but it didn’t happen, just one of those days…
I managed to get some cool stuff done with the plasma cutter though, mostly making openings to gain access to the bilge under the saloon floor, which was limited before.

That thing here is about as close to a jedi light saber as you can buy nowadays… if it was not burning in the 25000°C range, yes that’s 45000°F, i would say it is cool…

And would you believe that the platting making the top of the bilge was 5 mm thick? No wonder karaka is heavy… she is built like a panzer tank…

So i guess now i’m ready to finish with this rust in the bilge… manaña manaña

The bottom of the bilge

So a couple days without updates, i have been working quite hard…
I finished scaling the rust under the toilet, and also the port side lockers. This side is now all cleaned and painted.

On the top picture you can see the steel as it looks before painting. It appears rusty, but in fact i took it back to bare steel, and then applied a coat of zinc chromate primer on it, which converts the residues of rust and makes a barrier coat for the epoxi primer to stick. The zinc paint is see through.

There is one hole going outside, but i’ll wait to see if there are any others before patching it up. It is the same as the hole in the kitchen, about finger nail size. I punched the chisel of the air hammer in it until it widened to the thicker steel around. I think those “worm holes” are due to the rust inside reaching one of those spots from the outside that got electrolysis while karaka was waiting in hong kong without zinc anodes,  before i found her. So no big deal, i will fix it easily by welding a small patch on the inside, then fill the gap from the outside.
Between my two coats of primer, i started on the main bilge, the big one under the saloon, which is very bad with rust. Somebody at some stage poored concrete in there, and i wanted to see what was the state of the steel under it so i went at it with my jack hammer, only to find it too weak to break the concrete. I tried different chisels on the tool but the best is still a cold chisel and a sledge hammer. I cleaned part of the bilge where the concrete was shallow, and reached metal and rust. It is not as bad as i thought, and somehow the rust there is pretty thin and ultra hard, it is very difficult to chip it with the tools i have. So i decided to leave the concrete in,  whatever i do i don’t think i can make the hull stronger than it is now. It might be a problem a decade from now, but i can’t be bothered with it now. I got enough work as it is.

That is the part i cleaned the concrete out of, after cleaning the rust off. Good enough for me, shiny steel again.
I also cut off some old useless steel pipe that were running in the bilge and were in my way. I tried to use my new plasma cutter for that, but couldn’t get it to run, so i used the grinder instead. That was a bitch. And all that was my saturday…

Then after that i got a bit tired of working non stop so i took a day off yesterday, just hanging out on the boat, sleeping late and watching movies… i tried to rest and relax but kat decided to go on heat, and i’m out of the hormone pills i usually give her, so the poor thing have been howling and crying for three days now. I know it is not her fault, the poor cat has no boyfriend, but damn is she a pain when she is like this…

Anyway, this morning, back to work in the bilge. I started by fixing that plasma cutter, as i want to open part of the saloon floor to make a second opening into that bilge, to make access easier for me to work, but also for storage later. I made it run alright, but i need to rig a better power cord, to have full power for it before i do big jobs with it.

Here is a picture of the foreward compartment of the bilge, as it stands, i haven’t touched it yet. Dirty, rusty and not very inviting…

The other compartment looked as bad, but i spent the day in it, and i got all the rust cleaned, all over the surface in there, and i even cleaned the concrete with the needle gun, to prep it for paint. I figure since i’m painting in there, i might as well make the whole thing white and shiny…

This evening, after several hours in there i did not have the courage to continue the preparation for painting, and so i left it like that for now. The proper technique is to clean only a small area, paint that, and then move on. That is what i did on all the other areas i’ve done so far, but this bilge is all connected, and too big and rusty to do it at once, so i’m hoping that the dry air of mexico will not make my steel rust too bad before i get to paint it. My plan is to open the floor first thing in the morning, then finish scaling the rust all over, then go over the whole area with a wire brush. The other difference with this bilge is that is is truly filthy, so i need to clean it thoroughly with soap and water before i can paint… which is not really something i’m looking forward to.
And then once ready for paint, i ‘ll have to crawl into the bilge with the paint fumes … i’m planning on using a roller at the end of a stick, but still, it is going to be nasty…
But if all goes well, in two or three days that bilge should be cleaned and painted, and then the only rust left inside the boat would be in the engine room, my next project…

Rust, rust everywhere!

So, two big days of work here on karaka… yesterday i started by cleaning up the boat and doing the dishes, it was about time, one gets messy when one lives by himself… after that i went to town to find a few supplies. Then back on the boat i got a mail from my friend alex inviting me to a barbecue in the evening, so with only a few hours ahead of me i decided to finish the rust banging under the toilet.

I did good but couldn’t finish in time, so went to the barbecue and  got drunk instead. On the way to the barbecue i went to the hardware store and bought yet another tool, a air hammer, which is nothing else that a hand held jackhammer. Being smaller than the needle scaler yet slightly more agressive, it is actually a great tool to get the big scales of rust out of those tight corners…

So i finished under the toilet, which was a nasty job, and then worked my way back along the port side bilge, under the seats around the table. The rust was really bad pretty much everywhere, a bit worse than i expected actually. I treated that area about 6 years ago, but any leak from the toilet, being salt water, would sit in this bilge and start rust. Since we use those lockers mostly for food storage, we installed some boards in the lockers so that the food never is at the bottom of the bilge,but that limits the access and this whole area kind of got forgotten… so i banged that with my new tool, and went through at several spots into the water tank, which is one side of this bilge, and once i also went through the actual hull. It is a small “worm hole” about finger nail size, with still a mm or two of metal thickness around it. Ideally i should cut the whole area off and weld a new plate, but i don’t feel like it, so instead i’m planning on welding a small patch over the hole from the inside, as a backing plate, and then fill the hole with weld from the outside. That should be good enough. For the holes into the tank as it is non structural, i’ll just weld a patch over them.

So i got all the bilge on portside clean and back to bare steel, cleaned it thorougly and then applied a coat of zinc chromate, the chemical that kills all rust and make a bonding barrier coat so that the subsequent coats of paint really stick…  and that’s it for the day… it was a lot of work though. Messy work too…

karaka is waterproof again

Done with the weld under the kitchen. It was not easy. I’m not that good a welder to start with, and then there was almost no access from the inside so instead of cutting a wider piece out and making a flush repair, i decided to make a quick and dirty repair.  I widened the hole a little bit to fit a big galvanised bolt in it, with the head inside the boat, then I tacked that so it wouldn’t move, and then carried all my gear outside and welded the bolt to the hull. It was very tricky as first i was upside down and second the metal around the hole was fairly thin so before i managed to set my machine right i melted a few more holes around the original one… it took me several hours to get it right, but now it should be fully waterproof. After that was done i cleaned everything and applied a coat of zinc chromate and one of epoxi inside and out.

Between the two coats i started to have a look at the bilge under the fore toilet, a bit of a scary one, on account of its location, and also because as the toilet is bound to leak slat water now and then, rust is always lurking in there… so I removed the floor, then the few years worth of detritus,vacuumed and finally could start to see the metal… i ripped off the inlet through hull for the toilet, which was weak and leaking and need replacing, and after all that that’s how it looked like:

It is not as bad as i expected but bad enough, especially given the lack of access. The needle scaler should fit in i think and will make quick work of that rust.
For the through hull, i will not replace it with a plastic one like it was, i will weld a steel pipe directly to the hull instead. It will be much stronger and much better… while the through hull is out i have access to a clean section of the hull, so i took my caliper to it, to double check if the hull is really 6 mm thick as i always boast, and well, i measured nearly 8 mm… so i guess 6 mm is correct, what with the paint on both sides. That looks pretty sturdy to me, that’s a lot of steel. That is also why i can get away with having so much rust in the bilges, even after loosing a few mm of metal i still have enough left to still have a strong boat…

Otherwise i finally shaved,here is the new style:

And by the way,Kat says hello :

Back to work

Spent the morning getting organised, including getting more paint, then started back on the rust in the afternoon. I got into the rust under the kitchen floor, it took me three or four hours to get it clear.

Under the sink is where most steel boats get bad, and karaka was no exception, i found a finger nail size hole through the hull, where the needle scaler went through the thin steel and rust flakes, and also another hole leading into the forward water tank…

I killed all the rust with acid, so that it is now inert, and can wait tomorow, when i’ll weld the holes shut and then start painting…
It is never a good surprise to find a hole through your hull, but that was expected,after all that is why I’m doing all this…

Life on karaka is pretty rough those days, what with all the stuff out on deck, dust and tools everywhere, and sitting on a concrete yard in the middle of the desert, but I have one thing to say for mexico, one eats well here. Tonight i made myself some “alhambres de res”, it is important to eat well to keep moral up…

Otherwise I have been on skype regularly with Kim back in australia, she is still working on the river boat in brisbane, and her bosses asked her to cover for them while they go on holyday on the first week of april, but she’ll be flying to mexico shortly after, about mid april…

On the clipperton front, i wrote a long detailed account of the trip there on Island Seeker, but i’m affraid it is bit too harsh to make it public… i can’t say i was very impressed with the organisation. I’ll edit it and post it shortly. In the mean while if you want to see what clipperton is like try to download jacques cousteau’s special on clipperton, it shows the island very well, and not much have changed there since 1981…