The Wind Did It, I Swear – Ep. 62.1

This is Part 1… Watch Part 2 with us at our YouTube Premiere TOMORROW (SATURDAY APRIL, 16th) NIGHT at 6PM Eastern!

Glad to be (nearly) done with our bottom job, we move on to our diesel engine, which needs maintenance and upgrades. ‘Course, no boat project is without hurdles. We get a serpentine pulley kit which proves to be more difficult to DIY than advertised, and the wind (yeah, the wind) turns what should have been routine maintenance on our heat exchanger into a $400 bill. 

Hopefully you get a couple laughs out of this one. 😉

Cheers!

Lauren & Kirk

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Kirk:
One of these things is not like the other.

Lauren:
That’s not how it goes.

Kirk:
It ain’t supposed to make that noise.

Lauren:
It’s only taken three days, several blisters, bruised knees,

Kirk:
And now this is like preventing us from launching our boat.

Lauren:
So, it’s been crazy windy and the whole boat is shaking.

Kirk:
It was a lot tougher than I thought. We’re getting close.

Lauren:
Last episode, we chronicled the process of applying copper coat to our boat. This was our biggest project yet and after three full days of painting we are exhausted and glad to be done for the most part, anyway. We still had some more sanding to do and those pesky spots under the jack stands, but for now we were jumping into another big project, multiple upgrades on our engine.

Lauren:
What have we here?

Kirk:
Well, this is our new heat exchanger. This is the result of a $400 mistake that I made that looks like that.

Kirk:
Well, we spent the morning wrestling heater hoses to take this guy out and it ain’t supposed to make that noise. We took this apart because I started unscrewing her pencil zinc for our engine to change it.

Kirk:
And this cap broke off and the zinc was stuck in there. If that breaks off, it could clog some of the waterways, which would significantly reduce the water flow, which cools our engine. So I’m going to take it apart and try and clean it out and see what’s going on in there.

Kirk:
And so I was soaking the heat exchanger in a vinegar bath and a giant gust of wind came and knocked our big tent over which knocked the table over, which knocked this onto the ground and put a big old dent in this. The problem we have is that this is a like rubberized gasket that seals over the end here. So as you can imagine, having a giant dent like that means that this is not going to have a very good seal here. This is made out of copper, which is a fairly easy metal to bend. So we could take it to a machine shop and have them hammer this out, which we may still do and hold onto this as a spare. But also squeezed this one, it put a really good sized den here and we still have the problem with all of this crap in here and this side is welded on so we can’t take this off.

Kirk:
The new one that we bought has a different style of gasket and it has an opening on both ends. If we were ever going to clean this one out again. We’d have to pull it all the way off the boat. This side we have straight easy access into from our cockpit lazarette directly to the zinc right here, which I was just going to take a look at and that would mean we could clean it out much, much easier. So we should be able to go in easily unscrew that, take a look at any of the zinc chunks that have been stuck in here and fish them out with our fingers.

Lauren:
It’s crazy windy right now. It’s supposed to gust higher than 30 I think. It’s really eerie being in a boatyard cause you just never know what’s going to go flying. Kirk just tightened down all the rigging because he was worried our mast was shaking too much.

Kirk:
Oh, hopefully that calms things down a little bit. That forced, they were just moving around way too much shaking the whole mass.

Lauren:
It’s been crazy windy all day today. Since, yesterday afternoon.

Kirk:
Yeah.

Lauren:
And the whole boat is shaking. It’s just, it’s really unnerving. I think we’ve gotten used to it for the most part, but there was just a huge gust and Kirk’s worried about the rigging and the pressure that the stands are putting on the hull. I can’t help but think what if the boat tips over but we don’t have wind anywhere near strong enough for that to happen. I think it makes us both feel really good about the fact that we decided to polar mast over hurricane season.

Kirk:
If I would have felt this before we left. I would’ve absolutely made the same decision.

Lauren:
You never would’ve question it cause I think we were like, Oh are we just doing this because we’re nervous ninnies or…

Kirk:
Yeah. I think it was definitely the right decision.

Kirk:
So last year we replaced our batteries and I had to fabricate a new battery box and alter the one that we currently had under the chart table seat and we put in three house batteries from Firefly called the Firefly Oasis batteries and one starting battery. And really it was more of a primary bank and an auxiliary battery cause we never actually started the engine from the auxiliary battery. This is one of three primary batteries. There are two more that are up underneath this area here. This open spot is where the auxiliary battery went, but since we never ever used the auxiliary and Firefly thankfully sent us one more cause they had a little screw up last year.

Kirk:
Firefly was still in startup mode when we made our original order of three batteries. When looking them over, I noticed that one had a lower amp hour rating than the others. As it turns out, they accidentally sent us one battery with a slightly different battery chemistry from an older batch.

Kirk:
We now have four batteries that we’re going to be using in our primary bank. So I’ve got to modified this battery box and change up a little bit of the wiring. These are all group 31 batteries, but the Firefly Oasis batteries were like a millimeter too big to fit down in this battery box.

Lauren:
Oh my God.

Kirk:
So I had to cut the edge of this battery box off and I glassed in a piece of marine ply there just a little bit wider to hold that. And now that’s what I’m going to have to do in this section here. So I’m going to have to cut right along there, pull that out, put in a new piece of marine ply and then glass it all in so that we can put another one of these batteries right there as well. So that we’ve got now a 25% larger battery bank.

Kirk:
There’s a rainbow. It’s such a weird day this has been.

Lauren:
We just had the worst shake I think, in the boat.

Kirk:
Yeah, it feels like the boat is about to fall off it’s rocker. It’s really…

Lauren:
All right, that works.

Kirk:
So, this is how this thing sits. What I need to decide is, I want to put this one to go up on both total opposite side up to here or if I want it to come more this way and then go up.

Lauren:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kirk:
Cause it was kind of resting on these and I don’t know if that’s a good idea…

Lauren:
Do you see this right here? It’s like melted.

Kirk:
It’s from being so close to this.

Lauren:
Oh really?

Kirk:
Yeah.

Lauren:
If we got another one of those little doodads and just screwed it right there-…

Kirk:
Yeah.

Lauren:
That would be pretty simple.

Kirk:
I don’t want to get in the way of this cause we have to change this.

Lauren:
Maybe it should run up and hang in the same loop that is.

Kirk:
I think what I’ll do is, I’ll do that last and get that on them.

Lauren:
Yep.

Kirk:
All nice and good. All right.

Lauren:
All right, mines on.

Lauren:
What is that thing down there?

Kirk:
That’s the oil cooler.

Lauren:
That thing is just floating.

Kirk:
Yep.

Lauren:
Weird.

Kirk:
So I almost wanted to move it while we did all of this.

Lauren:
Yeah.

Kirk:
But that’s in another really big project. But what I’ve seen is it’s actually strapped under this and hanging back here.

Lauren:
Oh.

Kirk:
We have to get all new hose and that’s high pressure oil hose. We’d have to change the oil right now. Run all of that and run into new hose from our water pump and it’s just… That’s a task for next year.

Lauren:
So we are doing how many things on this engine right now?

Kirk:
Replacing an alternator, a water pump and a heat exchanger.

Lauren:
Okay. That’s good for now.

Kirk:
Yeah.

Lauren:
We had wanted to upgrade our alternator for a while as our current one was original to the boat and wasn’t charging our battery bank. In fact, when the engine ran, we’d often lose power. If you get an alternator larger than 80 amps, you need to upgrade the belt on your engine. So we also ordered a serpentine pulley kit, which includes a new belt, crankshaft pulley and water pump.

Kirk:
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is a little different. One of these things prevents me from installing this alternator. So if we count the ridges here, there’s either nine ridges and 10 valleys or 10 ridges and nine or something like that. But if we do the same thing over here, Oh look, there’s only five or six. What have we here? Only five or six. Oh that belt only five or six

Kirk:
Thank you Belmar for making this installation process totally not seamless. This is the way that boat projects go. What you think is supposed to be a bolt on project. What is sold is a bolt on kit is not. The other major problem that we have that we discovered last night is this crankshaft pulley. The outside diameter of our crankshaft on our engine is exactly 1.2500 inches down to the 10000th of an inch. This crankshaft pulley is off by almost a full 200000th of an inch and will not fit over the crankshaft and now this is like preventing us from launching our boat because I cannot install this thing and our engine can’t run and so we’re stuck in this boatyard. If there were an emoji for this occasion. It would most definitely be the turd pile, the face palm, and the crying emoji, I think.

Lauren:
So, it’s a face palming, crying, turd emoji is what you’re saying?

Kirk:
Yes. It’s a turd that is crying and also smashing a pile of turd hand into his face.

Lauren:
Oh, double turd. Hey, but on the plus side hand-…

Kirk:
Well, his hand is made out of turd if he’s made out of turd.

Lauren:
Look at this. Eggs with avocado.

Kirk:
You know what we haven’t done in a while, Lauren-…

Lauren:
And tortillas are under there… What?

Kirk:
We haven’t sent in the eggs!

Lauren:
That’s not how it goes.

Kirk:
Bring in the eggs!

Lauren:
You did?

Kirk:
Not on the video.

Lauren:
Okay. Well, you tell everyone what you didn’t do right. Look through the f-ing box!

Kirk:
Okay, so I just looked through our packaging a little bit and Balmar maybe is off the hook for one of their issues because I found this and I’m pretty sure I can swap that out, but still the pully on the crankshaft won’t get any bigger!

Kirk:
Before installing the crankshaft pulley that wouldn’t fit. I had to remove the old one and this was easier said than done. I needed to stop the engine from turning over when loosening the bolt and this took a little bit of trial and error, but I eventually got enough friction by lining the old crankshaft pulley with some duct tape and looping align over our cabin top winch. With the bolt free, I borrowed a bearing puller and remove the pulley to separate it from the adapter plate. Once this assembled, I set this all aside to focus on an easy win.

Kirk:
Well, I got the new water pump in, which is the first of three pieces of this kit. This is the alternator that we’re going to be removing. This is the new water pump that we just replaced and underneath that strout is our crankshaft and the crankshafts pully that I am going to have to machine. So this is the old water pump. You can see the pulley for this old system is a single V pulley. When you get to a larger alternator, this single V pulley doesn’t have enough grip to be able to turn the much larger alternator to generate power and then the belt just starts slipping.

Kirk:
So we now have this much fatter belt with six little grooves in it and much more surface area to be able to grab onto all the pulleys so that it doesn’t slip. And the reason we started looking at this whole big giant kit was partly we wanted more power but also we discovered this crack in the water pump pulley and well we wanted to upgrade the alternator and lucky for us, this alternator kit came with a whole new pump.

Kirk:
To make the new crankshaft pulley fit. I wrapped a socket with some emery cloth and started sanding. I need to get up to 1.2500 and we’re still a little ways off from that. It was only off by 175 thousandths of an inch, but it needed to be perfect. If I sanded it too much or made it oblong, it could be pretty disastrous at high engine speeds.

Kirk:
Got the alternator out.

Lauren:
Yay.

Kirk:
Now we get to see if the new one fits. That goes in there.

Kirk:
So that buzzing bee noise in the background is Lauren resanding our copper coat. We have to do a light sanding after the copper goes on to expose the copper and the epoxy. I am down here in the engine, just put a hole in our oil seal here, doing another one there to be able to pull this out. Did the two holes in the screws and pulled with a pair of vice grips and some channel locks to get this off. It was a lot tougher than I thought. Well, that’s a big step. That’s awesome.

Lauren:
I was going to give you a high five.

Kirk:
Oh yeah?

Lauren:
Yeah.

Kirk:
I want it.

Lauren:
Sounds satisfying. Kirk finally got the crankshaft pulley on the crankshaft. It’s only taken three days, a ton of scotch tape, a bunch of emory paper, several blisters, bruised knees, and of course a whole heap of swear words. Course!

Kirk:
I don’t have the swear words. We’re getting close… Got some boat bling… And this thing is not going anywhere. This was Lauren’s brilliant idea.

Lauren:
Sounds perfect.

Kirk:
Yeah.

Lauren:
Yay! Good job.

Kirk:
Big steps.