Removing the covers

The Covers

4/23/2011 Saturday. Each tank has silver covers to make it look nice. These are actually 1/8 peg board with a silver coating on the outside. The plan for the weekend is to remove the covers of the forward tank. (This is the aft tank but it shows the covers fairly well.)

I need to see behind the covers to see how the tank is held into place to determine the effort it is going to take to remove the tank. Before the covers can move, all the wiring, writing trays, fuel lines and tank fittings need to be removed.  This pretty much takes up all of Saturday. Once the fuel lines were taken off, more fuel runs out of the fittings. I caught the fuel in the cut off bottom of a plastic jug. Then transferred it to the five gallon fuel tank. All to keep it out of the bilge. Note all the white (or red) fuel pickup rags everyplace. This shot is looking down the galley, thru the hatches, at the bottom of the tank and the bottom of the boat.

4/22/2011 Sunday. The inside cover is finally off. Behind the cover is some sound proofing material. Not really sure why this here but maybe to keep the engine vibrations off of the side of the tank. Now the framing around the tank can be seen.

This is a tight shot of the bottom aft part of the tank. These are the fuel pickup to the engine on the left and the bottom of the sight gage to the right. The framing is about 3x3s. There is ½ of plywood under the tank. I believe that may be the whole problem with the leak. Perhaps water got between the tank and the plywood base and that is where the rust comes from. I will have to look for a way to prevent this with new tanks. You can see that the vertical frame is bolted thru a rib that has been cutoff under the tank.

Here is a tight in shot of the framing showing the vertical frame, the horizontal frame and the cutoff rib that the vertical frame is bolted to. Surprising that it is bolted. This is the first thing on the boat that actually allows something to be maintained. Usually, everything is built in permanently. With the bolts, I may be able to actually unbolt something to make it easier to work on. Big surprise.

Finally, to have any chance to rebuilding everything, I have put all the nuts and bolts and parts into separate labeled zip lock bags. I have about 10 bags so far. When necessary, I also put a 3x5 card with a picture into the bag that shows how some set of parts go together. Hopefully this will make reassembly easier. That is also the purpose of all the pictures with labels. So I can see how to rebuild everything.

Fixing a Leaking Fuel Tank

The Problem

The problem is that one out of four fuel tanks is leaking. Each tank holds 104 gallons of diesel fuel. The port (left) side forward tank is slowly dripping fuel from the rear bottom. The tanks were built in 1987 so are 24 years old. The tanks are made of ‘black iron’.

This is the starboard forward tank with the picture reversed. The engine exhaust manifold can be seen along with the sight gage used to measure the fuel in the tanks. There is maybe 10 inches of space between the tank and the engine. There are two 104 gal tanks on each side of the boat. Between them is the exhaust hose that exists out the side of the boat. The fuel was split into two tanks to get the exhaust out between the tanks. Luck for me, that made the tanks smaller because of 200 gal tank would never be able to get out without moving the engines.

This is the rear bottom of the forward tank where the leak is evident.

4/16/11 Saturday. This weekend's work was to transfer more fuel from the Port side tanks so all the fuel would fit in the Starboard tanks and then to uncover the engine hatches. So on Saturday we moved the boat over next to a friend's boat so we could pump fuel to his boat.

We are using an oil transfer pump to move the fuel thru 1/2 garden hoses. I saw this setup when the Nordhavns were crossing the Atlantic. If I remember correctly, they had brought 300' of garden hose to move fuel from one of the bigger boats to one of the smaller boats if necessary. I believe they did a practice run and it worked fine. I certainly would not recommend this for anything but a temporary solution. The oil transfer pump is ignition protected, so no sparks.

The pump turned out to be not powerful enough as we could not pump from the bilge of my boat up over the gunnels of the other boat into the fuel fill. So after trying for two hours, we gave up on that and went for the manual transfer method of filling up a 5 gal can and moving the fuel by hand. We managed to move 57 gals that way which was enough so all the remaining fuel will fit into two Starboard tanks. The day’s work was done but it was pretty exhausting. Fuel is heavy.

4/17/11 Sunday. Today’s job is to move the galley counter off of the engine hatches. We have six big hatches located over the two Cat 3208 engines. The galley counter covers up four of them. Not the best design but all boats are compromises of some form. So move the galley, the hot water, cold water, sink drain and some 12 volt power all needed to be disconnected. Then there are 6 bolts holding the counter to the floor. So it is vice grip on the nut inside the counter. The down to the engine room and undo the bolt. Back to the galley to pick up the nut and washer and put into the bolt bag. Repeat whole process six times. Pretty bad on the knees up and down to the engine room. We are keeping labeled bags of parts so the whole thing can be put back together.

Once the counter was moved, the carpet rolled up, the hatches could be opened. This would provide access to the tank outside of the engine. The next set of work is to disconnect or move any wiring, etc. that is screwed to the silver covers over the tank.