I started to write a blog post on Friday morning, but by Saturday evening the still-open browser window – the blog editor page with just the word “Stress” written in the title box – had become its own succinct review of the events of those two days. I won’t bore you with the details, but the main point is that after some fast talking, the VPD granted me another couple of days to get my engine going. I spent most of the weekend working on her, and as of now I am reasonably confident (though knocking wood) that she is working well enough to get me the heck out of Dodge.
A quick highlight reel – in the past three days, I:
bicycled over forty kilometers and rowed over eight kilometers in total,
borrowed a truck and drove to Bellingham and back for engine parts,
had my oil filter spring a leak, leaving me with a couple of liters of used engine oil in my bilge,
spent over $700 on a new exhaust system, and assembled and installed it,
ate six cans of sardines and probably over a pound of sliced ham,
drank most of a bottle of Sailor Jerry, and
went out dancing. Twice.
Tomorrow morning I try once more to escape the Creek. My first destination will be Kitsilano.
It’s now been about twenty four hours since “the incident”, and the VPD still haven’t shown up. I’m not much looking forward to their visit; it could really only go one of two ways, and those ways depend entirely on who the attending officers are. I figure they will either let me stay – though they may be angry and/or aggressive – or they will tow me out.
The problem with being towed out is that I cannot safely anchor out in English Bay in February weather without an engine – if I drag anchor, I could end up on the rocks, or worse. They can’t – or at least, they shouldn’t – put me into a potentially dangerous situation. That leaves one option: they could choose to tow me to the VPD docks and impound my boat. That would *really* put a damper on my adventures!
Anyhow. I found the part I need. Actually that was easy, as I had already sourced and purchased the part a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, getting another replacement wasn’t so easy, as there apparently isn’t a single water trap in Canada at this time. With some calling around and favours called in I managed to track down a water trap at a marine supply house in Seattle, though due to license agreements they cannot sell it to me in Canada. They did however suggest a shop in Bellingham that they could sell to, who could subsequently sell it to me, and so by way of Sweden to Seattle to Bellingham to FedEx to Vancouver – at significant expense – the part should arrive on Monday.
all the bits I need to replace
The real faulty part, the one that I am 95% sure caused all these problems in the first place, is available in Vancouver. According to the internet, the raw water injector elbow apparently only lasts about five years before rusting out and clogging up – honestly, I should have predicted this, it would have saved me a lot of time and money. The injector elbow is attached to the engine block with a… I don’t know what it’s called, an attacher elbow thing. That thing was seriously rusted, though when I last removed it to check it it seemed fine on the inside, and the guys at the marine store said that they last an awfully long time, so I wasn’t worried. Still, when I went to pull the injector elbow off today, the bit connecting the two snapped off in my hands. Not exactly the kind of behavior you expect from an ostensibly solid steel fitting!
The results of running the engine without exhaust cooling are evident in the photo; a big hole burned in the water trap, the plastic elbows melted, and the bit of flexible exhaust hosing is now somewhat suspect. I’ll likely replace the exhaust hose at the same time, probably picking up a few new stainless-steel hose clamps as well. The funny thing about hose clamps is that about 80% of the time they say ‘stainless steel’ on them but the little screw holding them together isn’t actually stainless, so after about a year you come back to find the band is still nice and shiny while the screw is a featureless lump of rust.
Anyhow. This isn’t even close to what I’m supposed to be working on right now. I have a big webserver rollout with a due-date of Monday, which means I’ll likely be working through the weekend. Back to the grind…
This morning I awoke to a gorgeous, sunny day, an obvious sign that my move out of False Creek would go smoothly. Of course, I neglected to check on the phase of the moon or something and it all went horribly pear shaped – I am currently still at anchor in False Creek, about 500m west of my previous anchorage. I’ve been sitting around doing dayjob work and waiting for the VPD to show up so I can tell them my sob story and pray they don’t issue me a fine or tow me.
This morning I cooked a big breakfast, checked in on work stuff, and prepared Tie Fighter for the grand exit. I fired up the engines – she started (almost) right away! I pulled the anchor; no small task, with months of False Creek grime and growth along the full length of the rode, and noticeably heavier due to the addition of a thick steel cable that I dragged up from the bottom also. The ocean floor of False Creek has a legacy of a hundred years of industrial garbage.
I motored away from my anchorage, a bit nervous, and made it about 200m west before I heard a strange ‘clunk’ and the engine started making a new and different noise – nothing huge, but a perceivable shift, and that’s never a good thing. I went down and checked out the engine compartment, and I could hear a bit of a noise but couldn’t see anything out of place. I later discovered that the secondary water pump – which wasn’t hooked up, but which I had bolted loosely to the engine “just to get it out of the way” – had shaken loose of its mounts and was resting against the beltwheel of the primary water pump, grinding into the bronze housing of the pump.
I went back up to the cockpit and throttled up, and things went smoothly for about five minutes – I could almost see the Granville Bridge, and I figured I could dock there and sort any further problems out before making my way out into English Bay. No such luck; within another minute I felt the engine power drop suddenly, and I saw smoke begin to pour into the cockpit via the engine compartment vent. I immediately throttled down, dove below and opened the engine compartment hatch, only to be met by a cloud of black smoke. I killed the engine and waved the smoke away looking for signs of fire, ready to jump for the fire extinguisher at the first sign of flickering yellow and orange. Fortunately there were no flames, just thick, black smoke pouring out of the dark engine compartment. I thought at first that perhaps I had over- or under-tightened a belt, but as I looked closer I realized that there was a gaping hole melted into the side of the brand-new water trap I had just installed, and the plastic elbows in the exhaust line had both melted beyond recognition. $@&%! The smoke was a combination of diesel exhaust and scorched plastic.
With no engine, floating free in the shipping lanes of False Creek, I was in a bit of a bind. I threw out my anchor and got on my VHF radio.
“Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, this is Tie Fighter, Tie Fighter, over.”
“Station calling Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, go ahead, over…”
I outlined the situation – normally the Coast Guard would recommend me contact a towing company, but given that I was about 500m from their station I thought it might be worth a try giving them a call. About ten minutes later they showed up and offered me a tow, which I gladly accepted. They tied the massive Coast Guard zodiac – the ‘Kitsilano 1’ – to the port side of Tie Fighter and towed me the 150m or so to the nearby anchorage, where I dropped my anchor. I thanked them and sat down to give them all the information needed for their incident report. They left me a copy of the report, so that I can present it to the VPD when they come knocking next.
Anyhow – the long and the short of it is that my exhaust system has been malfunctioning for a while, and now I am 95% certain the problem is in something called a “raw water injection elbow”. The elbow is where seawater that has been used to cool the engine is injected into the exhaust system, cooling down the exhaust and ejecting the warm seawater from the boat. These elbows apparently only last about five years, and lacking a decent record of maintenance on my engine, I have absolutely no idea when the last time mine was replaced.
End result? I’m still in False Creek, albeit closer to the Granville Bridge. A new water trap is about $330 (I know this well, having just bought one last week, argh), a new injector elbow is $390, the connecting bit which may need to be replaced is about $120 and the replacement exhaust elbows are about $35 each. Instead of moving on with my great adventure, I’m now out about a thousand bucks and have a bunch of engine work ahead of me.
Someday. SOMEDAY this engine will be stable and reliable!
It’s Thursday, and I’ve got three major, looming deadlines staring me in the face. I think I’ve got a handle on all of them, but it’s definitely not a relaxing time in my life right now.
<Geek>
On the work front, I’ve migrated two very large web properties into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud over the past eight months or so. I’ve been learning the ins and outs of the new technology as I go, and the playing field really has changed. There have been a tonne of little headaches and bugs and glitches, and I’ve been pulled out of bed at 5am more often than I care to admit. And now – just when we’re finally stable – a directive has come down from the Evil Masters to port both sites to a common backend using the latest new Drupal code. On one hand this will open a lot of doors for us, allowing us to scale a lot quicker and use some of the more modern tools, like storing all images on a Content Data Network (CDN) instead of on our current frontend webservers. Still, the deadline for launch is February 12th and that’s coming up faaaaaaaaast. I’ve barely got the preliminary test servers in place!
</Geek>
On the boat front the engine work continues, though the work seems to multiply every time I put time into it. I’m finding a great deal of satisfaction in it, actually – I mentioned to a friend yesterday that it is very much like ‘The Legend of Zelda’, in that the puzzles are difficult, but once solved there is immediate positive feedback (ie the engine works better) and you can move on to the next puzzle, often using knowledge or tools you gained from the previous level.
Yesterday’s miniboss was changing the zincs in the engine. Sacrificial zincs are bits of… well, zinc. The theory is that if you bind several types of metals together in a marine environment, the weakest metal will corrode. Because of some kind of galvanic voodoo, the other metals will not corrode until the weaker metal is completely corroded away. Zinc is a very weak metal, easy to work with and cheap, and so quite a few different parts of the boat have sacrificial lumps of zinc attached to prevent the more important bits from corroding.
The zincs in the engine should be replaced about once a year, more or less depending on use. My engine has three zincs – at $7.00 per zinc, it’s a $21.00 job to replace them all, but compared with approximately $10,000 for a new engine, the price is negligible. The zincs are attached to the end of thick bolts and screwed deep into the heart of the engine.
One of the three zincs is located right on the front of the engine, easily accessed. The other two zincs are located far down the right side, between the engine block and the wall. Once I stepped back and surveyed the engine, I found that I could just barely get a socket wrench in a gap, which allowed me to remove zinc #2 with little difficulty – but zinc #3 was a real hassle. To get at the third zinc I had to remove the fuel lift pump (skills and items gained from previous level!) and the exhaust manifold – and even then the bolt holding the zinc into the engine was seized pretty solidly. I ended up having to extend the socket handle and actually step on it to get the bolt free; never send a hand to do a boot’s job. I swear I heard victory music when that bolt finally gave way.
So far in the past month I have rerouted the fuel lines, replaced the fuel filter, installed and plumbed a second fuel filter, replaced the damaged exhaust water trap ($300, ouch), replaced the impeller in the raw water pump, and replaced the zincs. Remaining, I have to have the alternator tested and serviced, pick up new oil, drain and change the current oil, drain and change the transmission oil, take the heat exchangers to the radiator shop to have them boiled out, pick up antifreeze, install the secondary cooling pump, drain the engine cooling system and replace with antifreeze, reroute the raw water intake through the heat exchangers, rewire the instrument panel, and then get the fuel tank polished. Whew! Someday soon, I will have an engine that runs reliably; ideally one that I do not have to climb into the engine compartment with a screwdriver to start. There’s almost no chance I’ll have all this done by Monday, so I really have to pick and choose what tasks are actually important.
…and then I get to start on the electrical system! For some reason, since returning from Vegas the house batteries aren’t holding a charge anymore. I have no idea why; I need to replace the batteries and purchase and install a modern charge manager. I don’t expect to get that one sorted out for under $1000.
Lastly, I have Sequential Circus coming up on Saturday. This is a huge show, with six live-pa acts performing 45-minute sets at a local show venue slash warehouse space. Everything is coming together smoothly, mostly because it’s our sixth time running this show and we’re all getting really good at it. It’s really starting to look like we’re going to have a solid crowd too, which takes a lot of the financial stress off of my back – if everything works out well, I might just come out of it a hundred bucks richer!
I still haven’t figured out where to go on Monday, and the False Creek / Olympic Village security lockdown continues… more on that soon.
I may not be warm, but at least I have an engine that starts.
Ok seriously, it’s fracking cold out here. The past few days the temperature has dropped further and further, and as I write this it is 6pm, pitch dark outside and -6°C. I know some of you are reading this from the Prairies or the Maritimes, where the ambient temperature has been hovering around -20°C, but I’m going to go ahead and assume that you also have furnaces and insulation and such. Tie Fighter is made of 3/8″ marine-grade plywood over cedar stringers, with an R-value of… god, I have no idea. Not enough, anyway. It’s COLD.
click to view larger - can you spot the outline of the (heated) cabin vs. the outline of the (unheated) closet?
I’ve had some questions posed about insulating the boat, and the short answer is: I’m still researching. One school of thought says that the only way to insulate a wooden boat is to use foam rubber, and bond the foam directly to the wood, being careful not to leave any air gaps between the wood and the foam. The reasoning is that if you leave air gaps, you’re inviting condensation, which to wood means mildew or eventually rot.
The other school says that you should never bond anything to the wood, because that makes it much more difficult to notice problems, and a helluva mess to work with. They say to rather allow it to breathe and stack insulation over top that can have air forced in behind it via fans or blowers, so that the condensation can dry up on its own.
What am I going to do? I have no idea. I’m still soliciting opinions from various liveaboard forums and fellow False Creek denizens. For now, I’m toughing it out and burning several different forms of fossil fuels at the same time trying to stay warm. When I woke up this morning I had to break up the ice in the sink dishes before I could make breakfast.
Cold aside, I HAVE A WORKING ENGINE AGAIN! The diesel engine theory class paid off in spades, and I was able to diagnose the problem, correct the situation, and get Maude started. This was a huge boost to my confidence and self-esteem, especially given the nature of the problem and my previous (complete lack of) experience with engines.
To recap; Maude had started to lose power at some point during my last run up to fill my water tanks. The change was gradual but immediately noticible; the engine dropped in power without my touching the throttle, which is up there with “sounds different” or “emitting smoke” or “smells funny” on the diesel engine scale of uh-ohs. Not quite ‘explosion’, but definitely not good.
The most immediate difference between my response to this problem after having completed the diesel theory class vs. my response before the diesel class is that I now have any response at all other than ignoring the problem and hoping that it will resolve itself. Carrie once said to me “I don’t deal with little problems anymore. Little problems either go away on their own, or they become big problems. I deal with big problems.”. I took this somewhat to heart, but I have come to realize that that philosophy can only apply to some aspects of life; in other situations – diesel engines being a noteworthy example – it’s best to deal with little problems immediately and with extreme prejudice. Don’t just solve problems, smash them out of existence with the largest hammer you can find.
the fuel lift pump, source of my woes
Maude had started to lose power, and I ignored it. The next time I tried to go for water, Maude died about four minutes into the voyage. Fortunately the incoming tide pushed me directly back over my anchoring spot, or I would have had to radio the Coast Guard for assistance. Attempting to restart her seemed to work intermittently, she’d start but die as soon as I applied any throttle, which is exactly the behavior one would expect from water in the fuel lines. The answer there would be to drain the water from the fuel lines, bleed the lines of any newly-introduced air, and then restart the engine – bearing in mind that the “bleed the lines” portion of that answer is an eleven-step procedure requiring three different sizes of wrench.
Needless to say, I was unsuccessful with the bleeding of the lines. For the life of me, I could not seem to get the air out of the lines; I must have pushed that little fuel lift pump lever tens of thousands of times, blistering and scraping my hands in the process. Nothing seemed to work!
Fortunately I had signed up weeks before for the Cooper Boating ‘Advanced Diesel Theory’ class, and so I went to class and paid close attention, asking so many questions that I’m sure the teacher is glad to be rid of me. Each week I returned from class with fresh resolve and a new set of hints, and spent a few hours poking at the engine trying to figure out what part of the bleeding process I was doing wrong. Each week I was unsuccessful.
After five straight weeks trying to perform the relatively simple process of bleeding the lines, I decided that I was doing it right and that there must be something actually wrong with the process. I decided to take each part in turn and track out the problem, just like I’d do with a computer issue. Eventually this led me to a conclusion: the fuel lift pump just wasn’t lifting fuel.
source of the problems, click for closeup
Long story short, I pulled the fuel lift pump off the engine and disassembled it on my kitchen table. I found that the input valve assembly was clogged in the ‘open’ position with a motley assortment of plastic scraps, gelled diesel and hair(?!), which I removed. This was clearly a result of the stock fuel filter having been removed by a previous mechanic and a third-party fuel filter installed instead, after the fuel lift pump instead of before it. I cleaned up the pump, tested and reinstalled it, changing the location of the fuel filter along the way – but still I had no fuel flow!
Finally, after putting together a bit of critical information from the instructor along with a tidbit from the guys at Stem to Stern, I realized that the copper washers in the banjo bolts connecting the fuel lift pump to the fuel lines must be letting air into the lines. I replaced the copper washers, tightened up the banjo bolts, and suddenly fuel began to flow. I performed the rest of the air-bleed procedure, cranked the engine, and low and behold Maude shuddered to life.
Anyhow. I have an engine again, though I haven’t yet installed the secondary fuel filter I purchased, nor replaced the belts, nor replaced the exhaust tank. I have yet to change the oil, either in the engine block or in the transmission. I haven’t even begun to reroute the cooling system, changing it over from raw seawater to antifreeze – but all of these projects will come. I have a working engine, and with a little luck I can keep it that way. I am no longer afraid of Maude. The engine is no longer a black box.
Just to add to the stress of the bitter cold, the police have just motored past in their ‘R.G. McBeath’ policeboat, which is the one they use to enforce the anchoring bylaws – they didn’t stop by to chat, but they’re weaving in around the anchored boats, making their presence known. I don’t have any idea what is going to happen to those of us squatting here in False Creek. I suspect we’ll all be kicked out prior to the Olympics, but I don’t have any good ideas on where to go after that – there really aren’t any other good, sheltered anchorages around Vancouver. The hard winter might shortly become much, much harder.
