Category: General Repairs

I’ll Never Stop, Nancy.

Argh.

I spent a gorgeous weekend working on the boat, a stupid grin on my face most of the time. The end results are a few less fiberglass problems, a nagging cough from the sanding dust that got past my dust mask, a mild sunburn in the middle of my back, two more banged-up fingers, one of which is looking a little bit infected, and a hangover.

The boat is a disaster right now though, with every powertool I own littering the kitchen, a sink full of dirty dishes and screws and bolts and wires on every flat surface. I really need to spend some time cleaning up, but frankly I don’t know when that’s going to happen.

This morning it’s back to banging my head against the bulkhead – hey, maybe that’s the source of the name ‘bulkhead’? I slept well, but when it got light outside I was awake. I lay there for a long while, convincing myself that while it must already be 10am, with my work schedule I could afford to stay in bed until 11am or so… but then my pager went off with a work emergency. My laptop batteries were low, so staying in bed only lasted a few minutes before I had to get up, dress, and switch to the aft cabin (ie, walk out through the pouring rain). On my way out the door I grabbed my cellphone to check the time: 7:15am. I guess my internal clock needs some adjustment.

It was so cold this morning! I could see my breath, so I decided that it was probably time to tackle the stove – and at around 10am I rolled up my sleeves and dove in to clean it out with a stiff wire brush. Of course, burning sooty for the past week or so hasn’t done it any favours, and soon there was a three-inch deep pile of soot in the bottom of the burner. This is when I was struck with a rare moment of genius: I have a generator now, and so I can use the little shop vac that came with the boat!

Well, it worked, and I was able to suck up the soot just fine – but since it’s a shop vac there’s not really a filter, per se, and so about a third of the soot was promptly blown out the other side of the shop vac, all over the inside of the cabin. The second I noticed this, I put the motor portion of the shop vac outside, so I could continue cleaning out the stove, but it just blew soot all over the cockpit instead. You thought my boat was dirty before? Let me tell you, it was positively sparkling compared to now.

For now I’ve given up on the stove, and am returning to work. I went to Canadian Tire and picked up a decent single-burner propane camping stove instead, and proceeded to make coffee in under five minutes instead of an hour. It’s much warmer out, and I’m somewhat dry, so my mood is infinitely better, but damn, what a crappy morning! Best part: it’s supposed to stay rainy all week again. :/

Argh.

Ok, well, it’s day… six? I guess. Day six of officially living on the boat fulltime. This is the first day with any doubts.

Of *course* it’s raining, and it’s grey and cold outside, just like yesterday. It’s also very windy out, with gale warnings last night that had me keeping an eye on my GPS long into the night. Furthermore I haven’t had any coffee for two days, because my water supply has somehow become tainted, and my stove isn’t working properly.

The water I suspect I may have had a hand in. On Saturday I noticed that an old can of paint that came with the boat was leaking from the bottom seal. The paint was “bottom paint”, for painting the underwater portion of the boat, and as such is very nasty stuff, full of heavy metals. The paint was black, but whatever was leaking out of the bottom of the can was sticky and green, and made a big mess on the carpet – given the chemicals involved, this was the very definition of “toxic waste”! When I went to clean it up (wearing heavy protective gloves, removing and throwing out the carpet, scraping the underfloor with a scraper, and laying down new carpet), I noticed that it had also leaked through the floorboards and into the bilge, where it had pooled in a small corner. Lucky for me – if the leak had been two inches to the right, it would have gone into an extremely difficult place to clean. As it was though it was contained to a small area, and so I took up the floorboards, stood on the water tank, and cleaned up the toxic waste.

As I stood on it, the tank flexed a little, though nothing terrible – the tanks are made of heavy white plastic and bulge a bit when they’re full. I suspect however that this flexing is why my water now has a distinct yellow tinge. I don’t really know what to do about this, besides flush the tanks and start fresh, and to do that I need to pull the anchor and head up the creek to the filling station. I’m guessing there might be something I could do involving bleach? WestMarine sells some kind of water tank freshener stuff, but it’s pretty pricy and who knows what it actually is. I think I’m going to try adding 1/4 cup of bleach to the tanks, fill them, flush them out, then fill them again and see what that does.

The stove I think I may have figured out – it’s been throwing a lot less heat lately and a lot more soot, but I managed to find a manual for it online and it appears that it’s pretty much half poorly configured and half me not knowing how to use it properly. There’s a fan (unconnected of course) on the bottom of the stove that needs to be powered up in order for the burner to get the right draft needed to vaporize the diesel fuel, and right now it’s just not getting that draft. I’m thinking that probably what’s happened is that the fan not being on has caused the stove to produce more soot, which has clogged the air intake, causing the stove to produce even *more* soot. I think all it will need is a good cleaning and for the wiring to be set up to provide power for the fan, but man. Have you ever touched diesel soot? That stuff is black as night, and since it’s oil-based you need soap and water to get it off of you – no amount of rubbing on your pants will suffice. I do not look forward to being up to my elbow in the stuff, but if it means I can have a hot dinner then it must be done.

…but not today.

God. Just a constant barrage of new, tangible problems. In one way it’s really nice to have to use not only my brain to diagnose problems and work out solutions, but also to get my hands dirty actually implementing those solutions. Still, it’s dirty, difficult work, and my hands are not only dirty but scraped, cut, bruised, bandaged, rough and sore.

I’ve already done so much to make the boat a better place to live, but there’s still *so* much more to do! In order of priority:

  • Figure out what’s up with the water. Do I need new tanks? Hope not, apparently tanks are expensive, like >$200 each. :/
  • Figure out what’s up with the stove. Can I fix it myself, or do I need a repair guy? Apparently the company that made the stove is in Coquitlam, so assuming they still exist I should be able to get someone out here if I need to.
  • Gut and rebuild the abysmal electrical system. This means both dropping another $1000 on batteries, possibly yet *another* $1000 on a charge management system (one that will allow me to eventually add photovoltaics to the system), ripping out every last bit of the current wiring and re-doing it all to my spec.
  • While I’m on the wiring tip – I’ve purchased some LED lighting that works *really* well, but I have yet to find fixtures that have switches on them, so for now those lights sit in their boxes unloved. They’re awesome though, they’re the exact same size as typical halogen lighting and they’re a “warm” yellowish light that doesn’t at all feel like typical LED lighting. Very impressed! They were $20/per bulb at the electronics supply store, but compared to $185/per (!!!) for fixtures with similar bulbs at West Marine, I’m pretty pleased.
  • Clean the boat – can’t believe I haven’t done this yet, actually. I need to borrow a friend’s power washer, and from that I’ll determine if I actually need to purchase a small one of my own.
  • Finish repairing the fiberglass problems on the main deck – the more I finish, the more I find. They’re not huge, but they do need attention, and I don’t really feel like painting the deck until the problems are all fixed. A couple of good, solid days of grinding and sanding and epoxy/fiberglass patching and sanding and patching and sanding and filling and sanding and priming and I’ll be done.
  • Paint the deck. This will mean a lot of taping off areas, laying down anti-skid paint, then the final coat of deck paint over top. I’ve been thinking of doing some different colors on the horizontal areas; we’ll see when the time comes.
  • Purchase and install a macerator pump. Basically, it’s a pump that takes all the shit (literally) in the holding tank, runs it through a set of stainless steel teeth to chop it into fine bits, and pumps it out into the ocean. This is illegal in False Creek or any other public harbour, but totally fair game out on the open ocean – and sure beats having to pump out the tank every week or so.
  • Pull the boat out of the water ($400 or so) and paint the bottom – this will take a few days, and a few more hundred dollars, but needs to be done. I’m just praying that I don’t find any soft spots in the hull, because that would signify rot, and that would be very bad and cost even more to fix.

    • Argh. On top of all the boat work, I’ve got just over a month to come up with and practice a 45-minute talk on cloud computing for the Open Web Vancouver conference. I’m pretty confident that I can be educational and entertaining for 45 minutes, but it will still mean a lot of work to get it all together, make slides, practice, etc.

    Anyhow. The stove is lit, and I’ve got some bottled water in the stovetop percolator – in an hour or so I should have coffee. Today I have to continue working on porting one of the gossip sites into the clouds – I’ve committed to having it up and running by Wednesday night, and I don’t want to blow any more deadlines, so back to work I go.

    Constant Hustle

    God. Seriously.

    It’s Tuesday, and I have two more days to get everything out of my house and have it ready for the new folks to move in. There’s still so much to do!

    This week has been very expensive – I thought last week was pricy, what with the purchase of the $1700 generator (which, by the way, seems to be somewhat overkill for my needs! I probably could have gotten away just fine with the 1000w version instead of the 2000w – oh well, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have too much power), but this week has had four >$100 trips to Canadian Tire and two >$100 trips to the boating store so far! Worse yet, there’s no end in sight, as I’ve still got to completely overhaul the electrical system, finish repairing all the fiberglass problems on the deck, and then hopefully I’ll have time to start making the interior look a little more like a home and less like a hunting camp.

    One nice thing though – I realized yesterday as I was loading in some groceries that my nomadship (heh) is nearly complete. I’ve got canned and dried food to last a month, two months if I really had to stretch it. All the fuel tanks are full, and there’s another hundred liters of diesel in jerry cans in the amas. The water tanks are full too, giving me over a hundred liters of potable water – all I’m really lacking for an extended absence is a source of fresh protein (ie fish or meat). Not that I really *need* to be ready for any sort of extended absence… but given the econopocalypse, impending west coast earthquake, swine flu, etc, it’s nice to know.

    I don’t know if I mentioned, but the second time we had the boat out, the binnacle (thingy that sticks out of the deck like a podium that the steering wheel attaches to) pulled out the deck, exposing poor workmanship – don’t attach important things with short woodscrews! – and a small patch of rot that I’ll eventually have to tend to. I got around to fixing that yesterday, pulling the binnacle completely off and re-attaching it securely to the deck with long bolts and wide washers. When I went to reconnect the steering, however, I noticed a bunch of slack in the lines. I called Bill, the guy who sold me the boat, and asked what he thought of that.

    Well, turns out one of the steering lines had slipped from a turning block. That turning block happened to be deep in the stern of the boat, reachable through an access panel, but still at the end of arm’s reach. I got to spend the next hour and a half up to my shoulder in the wall of the salon, trying to free a thick steel cable from the pulley it had fouled. Waaaay fun.

    Seriously, every day something breaks on the boat, and I have to learn how to fix it. Sooner or later I’m going to know every square inch of her. In some ways I growl about this, as I look at weekend sailors with their gorgeous, perfectly-functioning boats, but in a much stronger way I know that this is the universe’s way of ensuring that the boat becomes truly mine. It is a series of tests, and as I complete each one I feel stronger for having done so.

    Anyhow. Just to add to the stress, I’ve been accepted to speak at Open Web Vancouver, a big web conference in June. I’ve never actually spoken at a conference before, so we’ll see how that works out…

    Back To The Grind

    Well, things progress.

    I mean, they could be progressing smoother, of course – I still don’t have a tenant lined up to move into the apartment, and April 1st draws ever closer. I’ve had a few people in to look at the place, but twice now people have come by, looked, told me they’d get back to me in a few hours and never bothered to call back. Rude!

    The boat progresses quickly – I’ve posted a few pictures of the progress on my other website, of the aft cabin and a few pics of the outside. She still needs a lot of work, but the more I work on her, the more I realize that all of the work is well within my abilities – to quote Trent, “it’s not rocket surgery!” I’m actually quite enjoying learning about epoxy and fiberglass, and the finished product is immediately gratifying; fix a leak, and water stops coming in. Boosh!

    I was hoping to make it out to the boat this week to do a bit more on it, but I’ve managed to score a free pass to the CanSecWest network security conference here in town. I can’t really spare the time off work, but given that a conference pass costs $1700 for the three days, I could also argue that I can’t afford not to go. I read an article yesterday that had a quote from Benjamin Franklin; “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.”

    The apartment is slowly emptying – more and more furniture is going away, and decisions are being made with regards to the layout of storage in the boat. I’ve decided that the starboard forecabin bunk is going to have to be sacrificed in order to make room for closet space; that’s not such a bad thing though, as it’ll mean a “proper” closet can be made, as well as a lot of extra space for boxes and such.

    Anyhow – back to work. This week’s task is to get the Evil Masters’ main website up and running in the Amazon cloud, and that means finishing up these i386 AWS AMI’s and building an x86_64 AMI for use as the database server and NFS server…

    Birthday

    Today, I turn 33 years old.

    Not that that’s a big deal or anything, but when I look back over the growth of the last year, I think. My friend told me that age 33 is significant to the Japanese, in that it represents the passing from being a “young man” to just being a “man”, or the entrance into the “summer” years of your life.

    I couldn’t find that on Wikipedia, but what I did find was that the Muslim faith believes that the dwellers of Heaven exist eternally in a state of being at age 33, and that Jesus was crucified at age 33.

    Regardless, 33 is the year in which I shall move onto my boat. In fact, with any luck that’ll begin this weekend!

    My mother and sister have outdone themselves, and clued into the fact that I am selling off or getting rid of most of my belongings, and as such I have no need for more birthday “stuff”. Instead, they both gave me gift cards for Canadian Tire, which is a mind-blowingly practical and useful gift. I have a list that I’ve been compiling for weeks of things that I need from Canadian Tire, and I’m sure the grand total will be many hundreds of dollars, so the gift cards certainly help!

    Another friend offered me a wonderful gift, though I’m not sure it was intended as a birthday thing – a free entry into a major security conference here in town later this month. Awesome! I was really interested in going to the conference, but frankly there was no way I’d be able to afford the $1700 entry fee. I’ll definitely be reporting more about the conference as I attend.

    Anyhow – no big plans for birthday night. I have kung-fu at 7pm, then will probably meet up with some friends for sushi at 9:30pm, but other than that, nothing. *shrug*. Such is the downside of having your birthday on a Wednesday, I guess.