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.

July 22/25

Big weekend of work this time. First was I finally decided on a new tank fabricator. I wanted the tanks redone locally so I could talk to the welders about construction, materials and most important take them a tank so the fitting would be guaranteed to fit the existing plumbing. Each tank has seven fittings, fill, drain, return, top/bottom sight gauge and two vents.  These are different sizes and I want to be sure the existing plumbing will fit the new tank. Some of the placements are critical as the plumbing goes through the floor and the tank covers. So I took off Friday afternoon to deliver the two tanks I have out of the boat to the fabricator.

This is the hole that caused all the problems (e.g. leak). It was in the bottom on the port forward tank and right where the tank sits on the support. So water probably got on to the support and ran under that tank and rusted this out from the outside. It did not leak too fast as the support was under the hole which closed it up somewhat. (I also stuck a key into the hole to see how strong the metal was. Pretty rusted out. With the tanks delivered, it was off to the boat for most painting, etc.

First up was cleaning, sanding, and painting the port side exhaust manifold on the port engine. One of the cooling hosed had leaked several years ago and dripped on the hot exhaust manifold and caused some rust. So the manifold had to be stripped of the rust down to bare metal as well as the engine mount below. I never could get to this area before with the fuel tank in the way so this was my one opportunity to clean up this whole mess. The exhaust was repainted with high temperature paint.

Next was to re-fiberglass the tank support. This is ½ plywood and was fiberglassed previously so I just had to clean it up and put another coat of glass on. After talking to the tank fabricator, we decided that the tank should not rest directly on the support platform but on some strips of very hard rubber. The rubber will be placed directly above the ribs. So the tank platform is not actually needed but I kept it to spread the load out a little over the ribs. The tanks will be ¼ so they will have a very strong bottom. However, we did not want any water to get under the tanks, so I cut holes in the platform to allow air circulation as well as to drain any water away.

Next was to deal with all the screws sticking thru the hull behind the tanks. This may have been the source of the water under the tanks. I did not want to disturb the screws as they hold on the outside exhaust tube. So I made some 1 ½ inch blocks of wood with a ¾ hole on the back side. The hole was filled with silicon around the screws and the blocks were fiberglassed onto the side of the hull. This will allow the screws to be undone at some point and still seal out any water intrusion. I thought of glassing the inside of the screws but then they could not be removed in the future. I really hate things that cannot be maintained in the future.

The final job for the weekend was to clean up around the aft tank so the area could be painted. This area had the latest diesel spill as the diesel ran out of the fuel lines as I was working on the forward tank. So more scrubbing, sanding and wiping down of the area. Then a first coat of Bilge Kote paint. All in all, a good weekend of work.

July 16/17

This weekend is continuing cleaning and painting the bilge. There is a lot of dirt accumulation and spilled diesel in the bilge. All this takes hours to clean up before the new paint can be applied. First is vacuuming up the loose dirt. Then washing out what is left. This takes using bilge cleaner and then fiberglass wash and a good scrub brush. It takes a lot to get the diesel up. This really smells a lot so good ventilation is a requirement.

This is the first coat of paint in the area between the port side fuel tanks around the exhaust exit thru the hull. It may take about three coats of paint to do a good job covering up the old gray paint.