Valkyr getting hauled out General Forum Forums

Erick said:

Looking forward to the pics.  That is wild about the prop falling out.  Glad you were able to get there after all of the issues.  What will you be doing while hauled out?

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Just bottom paint and fixing the stuffing box.. I will probably hammer on the through hulls to make sure they are ok also. They are all good groco bronze units so should be fine. I would love to let her sit out long enough for the hull to dry totally and do misc stuff to her.. However she is in pretty decent shape. We found two little blisters on the entire hull and one place where someone did a repair to the rudder that wasn't done right. One blister was the size of a quarter and the other of a dime. Not bad at all... I'm pretty tickled. We will probably be back in the water by Wednesday unless something goes wrong.

I'm having a hell of a time getting up there to do work so its possible it could go longer. Yesterday I headed out early and got 3/4 of the way to the marina about 50 miles from my house and the pickup's rear brakes ate themselves. A chunk of the rear rear brake pad came loose and wedged itself in when the brakes were applied.. felt like the rear axle was going to come off as the drum seized and released, seized and released over and over again.

Zsanic had to come get me and take me the rest of the way in the car after we dropped the truck at the repair shop. I couldn't really stay to get any work done though because we had the baby with us.  Hopefully today will let me get up there and get to working on the stuffing box. The marina is doing the bottom and the repairs to the rudder so I don't have to worry about that. I figured out that the labor of letting them do all that is about 300 dollars over what it would cost me to buy the rest of the materials to do the job myself. Made me happy not to be cleaning and painting 🙂

 

Scott

OK.. I'm sore from hanging upside down in the engine compartment for the last couple of days so am taking some computer time this morning to recuperate.

Here are some (a few) pictures of the boat being hauled, pressure washed, sanded, painted, engine room etc..

 

Here Zsanic is holding kaylin while valkyr gets hauled in the background. You can see a bit of growth on the keel. The hull was mostly slime with a scattering of barnacles.

3400 psi pressure washer stripped her down clean quickly.

I had to leave the day before while they were pressure washing her in the slings. When I got back the next afternoon the boat was washed and the old paint been sanded down till she is mostly smooth. The old paints are so tough that to get her stripped all the way down would have taken days with 36 grit or a sand blaster 🙂 I don't have the time or money to pay them to do that or do it myself so we are painting over the smoothed over old paint. It is the same formulation of paint so no issues there.

hull has two coats of bottom paint.. will get a third coat on Monday. Using a bottom paint with 60% cuperous oxide content. So should be good for another 3 or 4 years. It had been 5 years since she was last hauled and the paint job did an awesome job as the pictures of her being hauled showed. You can see in this picture that the rudder hasn't been painted nor has the keel under it. The only place we found any blisters were on the rudder. In opening them up we found someone had attempted to make a bondo fix to her at some point in the past. That is being ground out and going to be repaired correctly with west system and good fiberglass.  Same thin with bronze shoe under rudder. Someone used bondo to fair it in and the bondo just cracked. We have ground it all away and it will be faired with west system products and done right. Other than that everything looks great.

As you can see here I have taken the hose of that connects the riser from the exhaust manifold off the riser and the water lift muffler.. I was thinking that I would then be able to take the water lift muffler out to access the stuffing box.. no such luck… the platform and water heater that sits on it keeps the water lift muffler from coming out up and the exhaust riser wont let it come forward and out. At this point I still can't reach the back of the stuffing box and hose clamps for the log.

we finally got the water lift muffler out by removing the hot water heater and the platform it was on. For now I'm not going to put it back in as it wasn't working anyway. 🙂 I will repair it and then put it back in at a later date. As you can see even with it out access to the stuffing box is tight. To reach the hose clamps and log you have to go through the triangular opening. There was only one hose clamp on the aft end of the log and it was corroded to the point it would not come off. I used a rotozip with a flexible shaft on it with a dremel metal cut off disk to cut through all the hose clamps to remove them. For the rear clamp we will be going back with a industrial strength clamp that has a t bar tightening system. Actually I will probably get that for all the clamps on the stuffing box.

as you can see with the water heater out it starts to look much neater in the engine compartment. We tried to pull the exhaust riser out. I was planning to replace it as well as pull the water lift muffler out through the space it is in. However two days of PB Blaster and application of lots of force with a big pipe wrench and a hammer didn't even budge it.Though the surface of the pipe is corroded it is still really strong. I'm scared I'm going to break something and end up on the hard till I can get a new exhaust manifold. I can't afford an extend stay on the hard so since this is still structurally sound it is going to get wire wheeled off and painted and we will live with if for a while longer.

So the sensor for the speedometer went here. This hadn't been working for a while. In checking it out I found that a barnacle had grown up behind the paddle wheel. In trying to get it out the paddle wheel basically fell out and it is broken. 🙁 I need a new sensor now. 🙂 if anyone has one sitting around that still works for a old Datamarine Corinthian series 5100KL speedo let me know 🙂 I doubt that I will find one before going back in the water so will have to put the old one back in till I can get a replacement. I thought about just getting a newer model but I would mostly likely have to replace the thru hull and find a new place in the cockpit to mount the receiver.  as you can see below the instruments are 5 inch in diameter round units that fit a 4 inch cutout. not many manufactures make something to fit this. There is a company http://www.dmimarine.com that sells replacement units for the old datamarine sensors and instruments so if I can't find a used unit I will probably just buy a new one from them.

 

that's it for now..

later today or tomorrow I will be getting the parts to tie the water system and coolant systems from the hot water heater back together so I can turn house water back on and so that the engine can run without the water heater there. Clean out the through hull and re-grease and or replace the O rings in the old sensor and put it back in. Finish cleaning the old stuffing box and the area around it and re-packing it. Then put exhaust system back in. The alternator is still fried but I'm not to worried about that. It is only a 3 or 4 hour trip to the new marina and the battery bank has enough juice in it for about 3 days even if we run the fridge. I got an adapter Friday so that I could plug the boat into a normal 110 receptacle and the batteries are  back at 100% charge and floating on the shore charger.