Pulled from Jasons website http://www.jasonrose.com please visit there to see more about s/v Bodhran and Jason
I love left handed drill bits!!!!!!!!
Engine pulled and rotated to get to the sheared off bolts. Amazingly that’s clean black paint and not oil covering the side. My instrument panel leaks whenever I take of wave in the cockpit so the top of the engine looks like crap, but amazingly the sides and bottom are nice and clean:
Well it’s engine pulling time again on Bodhran. This time without Greg’s help things didn’t go quite as smoothly, but she came out eventually and once again the block is free of pesky sheared off bolts. Two things made this endeavor relatively painless. First I happened across a great used tool store here in Whangarei called Downtown Tools. I spent over an hour just browsing a getting the lay of the store and eventually came away with a 2000lb come-along for NZ$35. Between this and my boom vang rigged via a strap over the boom I was able to alternately apply pressure to the two lift points on the engine to allow it to come off at the angle I needed not to screw up the motor mounts. Of course it turns out that one of the motor mounts was completely stripped anyway. Not to worry, I found a replacement and 2 spares at the used marine store next to the marina. The second amazingly slick event today was the deployment of my new left handed drill bits. The first time I had a motor mount block shear off in the engine was in the Marquesas. Drilling out the hardened steel bolt wasn’t too big of a deal and with the help of an easy out, Greg and I extract the bolt end no problem. Of course I didn’t have any hardened steel bolts to replace the sheared off ones with, so I used what I had, stainless steel. Now drilling out stainless is a bit of a problem and here’s where the left handed drill bit is so cool. Instead of drilling a hole in the sheared off bolt, I only had to drill until the bit got a good hold and then because I had the drill in reverse, it simply backed the bolt out of the block with no muss and no fuss. That part of the job took less than five minutes. I then spent 2 hours trying to get the engine up on deck so that I could get in and replace the motor mounts and clean up the engine compartment. I ended up bailing on that so now the engine’s in the middle of the cabin. Oh well. Hopefully the next 3 days or so will find Bodhran with a working engine and a much cleaner engine/compartment.
The left handed drill bit backed the sheared off bolt to here and then I just unscrewed it the rest of the way with my fingers:
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