Back to work
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Sun 10 Feb 2013 18:44
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So, all too brief Christmas break over it was back
to work on the boat - annual maintenance that has turned into a significant
refit. Here's just one example:
 This heap of spaghetti is the bane of my boating
life, but a real lifesaver. It's part of our watermaker, living under our
bedroom cabin floor. You can perhaps get a flavour of my complicated maintenance
tasks just looking at this one small part. Seawater comes up through a hole in
the hull on the left foreground via a valve and strainer (the vertical
bronze cylinder) and into the large low pressure pump on the right. It then
goes through the two blue filter canisters on the left to a high pressure pump
in the engine room, then into the reverse osmosis membranes which remove the
salt leaving potable water. Simple physics. But the strainer has been leaking
and corroded the valve handle (stupidly made of aluminium and soft steel) so
I've had to replace the valve, with one of a different size of course, thus
requiring new pipework. I've had to remove the low pressure pump and
rebuild it because the shaft seals had started leaking seawater onto the
aluminium casting of the pump, rapidly corroding it away. I've had to
remove the high pressure pump for servicing (it needed new oil seals which are
too tricky for me to risk fitting myself). Just disconnecting it all and
cleaning up took half a day, and even then I had to cut one of the pipes.
Luckily I had bought a seal kit for the (now discontinued) pump before leaving
the UK. And there are several other minor problems all of which I've got to
address, all of which consume precious time - just today I've spent two hours on
the Internet trying to find a replacement for a seventeen year old seawater
divert solenoid valve which I discovered broken this morning.
Aaagh!
But we're taking a week off tomorrow to go touring
the Far North. I can't wait.
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