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.