Oct 29th

The new tank is ready for fuel. All the fitting have had a week to set up. I bought a new diesel transfer pump that can move 10 gallons a minute, instead of the old transfer pump that maybe was 1 gallon a minute.

I connected the pump input to the cross over lines from the other side of the boat where I have somewhere between 150 and 180 gallon of fuel. The pump output just going into the tank fill. I moved just a little fuel at a time and then checked for leaks. Then moved a little more and checked some more. I left the tank with about 10-15 gallons of fuel and will check next weekend for leaks. No sense transferring 100 gallons and then finding a problem. I really like this new pump, it really moves fuel like at the gas station.

Here is a good picture of the tank with all the covers back in place and the new cleanup valve, the drain and in the back the bottom of the sight gauge. Once I get the fuel moved and there are no leaks, I am going to wrap some new silver bubble wrap around the whole tank. This is more for looks than anything else but it will also provide some insulation and sound damping. I saw this on another boat that had new tanks and it looked really good. A roll, that will do two tanks, was $50. So $25 per tank.

Here is the new fuel in the sight gauge. Each inch is about 5 gallons.

Oct 16th

Here is a shot of the whole tank with all the supports in place. I have started repainting the new fiber glassed ones that went in last weekend. There are an equivalent set of new supports at the front of the tank also.

Part of the rebuilding work is to reinstall all the plumbing. There are eight fittings per tank. Drain, fill, return, two sight gauges, two vents and an extra cleanup valve that was plugged on the original setup. I am putting a valve into the cleanout this go around so I can tap the bottom of the tank to check for water as needed. These are all installed one weekend and then fuel is added a week later to allow all the sealant to dry.

Oct 8th

Getting the tanks back on the boat is only a small part of the whole process. It is a great milestone but still lots of work left to do. Now the tank has to be 'locked' into place. When full, there is 800 lbs of fuel and 200 lbs of tank that likes to move around. Remember, this boat goes out into 8 to 10 foot ocean waves. The tanks have two baffles each to slow the fuel movement down, but the tanks have to be locked into place very securely.

The tanks sit on a platform that is made up of three ribs glassed into the bottom of the boat. On the outside of the tank there are big rubber strips that the tank leans on along the whole length of the tank. On the inside are the 2x3 inch posts that are visible in the pictures. Between the tank and the posts are more rubber strips glued to the posts. At the front and back of the tank are the triangle supports glassed to the bottom of the boat with a sealer between the support and the tank. Even on top of the tank is a 3x3 inch block of wood between the tank and floor above. This is glued in place.

In this picture I have fiber glassed back in the triangle support at the back of the tank. It keeps the tank from sliding backwards in the boat. There is another piece of wood up against the hull that supports the covers around the tank. That has also been returned.

Sept 11th

The tanks have returned!

I have picked up the two new port side tanks from the fabricator. They look really great! Shiny and square. The old tanks were welded with too much heat and were bent and warped everywhere. The new tanks are much better in that they have straight sides and square corners. They are built to commercial standards of ¼ aluminum, instead of the allowed 1/8 or 3/16 thickness. This extra thickness also allows for bigger stronger welds. The pieces were not overlapped at all but edge fit and then the welds filled in all the area at then edges. But thick welds. Nice job.

(I must have forgotten my camera for the tank move to the boat because I did not get any pictures. So the first picture of the new tank is already in place.)

The new forward port side tank in place. There is now a grounding tab on the front and back of the tank.

My wife and I returned to tanks to the boat the reverse process of how they came out. We rolled then down to the boat on a furniture dolly, lifted it from the dock to the cockpit on the dingy hoist, slid it through the salon, into the lifting frame and down between the engines. These tanks weigh about 230 lbs so they are a little heavier than what came out but they can still be man handled around the engine room. While one tank went directly into the engine room, the other was stored in the cockpit until the first one was in place. No sense filling up the engine room with the second tank until it is ready to go in. I have kind of been enjoying all the space in the engine room and hate to fill it back up with tanks. I have been looking for a small nuclear power plant I could use instead of diesel fuel but I don’t seem to be able to locate one on the internet at this time. I thought of solar but ¼ knot of speed would not even get me out of the harbor in a day of running, so that has to wait also.

I asked that the new tanks be slightly smaller than the old ones because there is no extra room to get a bigger tank into the boat. So the new ones were about ¼ inch smaller. The other big difference is that they are square. The original tanks were all over the place and the cribbing was cut to match the tanks. With the new tanks, the cribbing is now a little too big. The fabricator recommended that the tank be suspended in air to keep anything from touching the tank and causing water problems. As that cannot be actually done, there are high density rubber strips under the tank at the support ribs and there are rubber padding between the tank and the cribbing posts. So the tank is not quite supported in air, but there is very little touching it. Hopefully, any condensation will quickly run down the tank to the platform under it and through the holes in the platform. There is no wood touching the tank at all to hold any water.

July 30th

While the first two new tanks our out being fabricated, I am working on the preparing for their return. One of the big problems with taking the tanks out was the process of removing the overhead to get at the bolts that held in the cribbing around the tanks. I was determined to make it easier to get at these bolts when the tanks were returned.

The solution was to cut access holds in the overhead so I could reach the bolts while the overhead was in place. This would allow me to put up the overhead ahead of time and have access to the bolts. In the picture, you can see where a hole was cut to allow me to get a wrench up into the overhead to get at the bolt and the associated nut when putting the cribbing post back.