Victoria and I did our now regular trip to Volos for Easter. I enjoy Victoria’s mom feeding me at every opportunity, and biking and walking by the sea daily is amazing.
The picture above is showing everyone in the neighbourhood going to the church at midnight and holding candles to celebrate Easter and the end of fasting. Everyone goes home and has a big traditional just-after-midnight dinner. Being Greek Orthodox is a big part of Greek culture, which is quite different from very secular Canada.
Plus, we had a few summer days by a beach!
The beach here is where Victoria had a cottage and is about a 10 minute drive from Volos.
Getting back to the boat, I finished re-building the manual bilge-pump:
The part I’m showing above is a threaded plastic bolt which is of a non-standard size (in-between sizes of what you can commercially buy). So you cannot purchase a nut that fits over that bolt. A previous repair had taken the next-size up nut, **sawed it in half** and then used many wraps of plumbers tape to make it ‘hold’. It worked for a while (I don’t use the manual bilge pump too often….usually just to test it) and eventually it all came apart. Also the plastic nut was stripped. Fortunately the part was included in the re-build kit. It was quite difficult getting it removed. The metal clips on each side holding it in place were of course corroded but eventually it all came apart, and the pieces were replaced with perfect (but expensive) replacements. One job done.
The next big job I’m doing now is re-building the Autoprop folding propeller that came with the boat as a spare propeller. I had noticed it of course when we purchased the boat, but didn’t pay too much attention to it. Our marina friends Peter and Gila have an identical boat to ours, but their boat goes a bit faster, which I find extremely annoying. Peter’s boat has a folding propeller, so when you are sailing it has less drag. I have a 30cm in diameter fixed propeller that is like dragging a giant dish plate behind the boat when I sail. This made me think of that old propeller I had stuck somewhere, and I discovered that this is the propeller that originally comes with the boat, but one of the blades would not move.
The propeller is a giant hunk of brass with balanced blades that swing out when it turns and fold back when it is not turning. The re-build kit, plus special tools, was 650 euros or just about C$1K. The prop new is supposedly worth many multiples of that, and I want the boat to go faster, so I got the kit.
Removing the first 3 screws took me about 4 hours over 2 days. I was being warned. The next part of the job was removing the ‘caps’ on each of the 3 blades:
The ‘cap’ is the part on the left with the 4 small holes. The kit comes with a very small piece of metal, with 4 studs that fit inside these holes and you are meant to turn the cap off with this tool. This is impossible. I watched a few videos of people doing this and I was warned. I spent 4 days adding lubricant, using leverage, tapping with a hammer, using a bit of heat……nothing. Plus I don’t have a work-bench to hold the part and 2 of the blades keep moving. Eventually I took it to a shop at the marina. The guy (George) would not believe that the little tool I showed him was meant to remove the caps. He actually laughed! Anyway he figured out a way to attach to tool to the cap, used a big blow torch and a big pipe on the tool and finally got the caps off.
The internals of 2 of the blades were filled with grease and were pristine. They came apart relatively easily and the parts inside looked new (the wonders of lubrication). The 3rd blade, that wouldn’t move, had no grease (I think 2 small seals were missed in the grease ports on this blade….I found none when I disassembled it and the other ones had little rubber seals….small parts matter) and was about as corroded as you can imagine.
With lots of effort I removed the tabbed-reverse threaded locking nut (the part you see), the other nut below that needs a special tool to remove….but then the blade would not come off the shaft. The other 2 blades essentially fell off after you removed these pieces, but this one was corrosion-welded in place.
Again, I spent 4 days trying to get this blade off. I used 2 different types of penetrating oils, lots of heat (I remembered I have a small propane torch) and a small gear puller ever though there was not much of a ledge for the gear-puller to grab on to. Here is a picture of the gear-puller in action.
Victoria was thrilled with the cockpit of the boat being turned into a makeshift workshop, and reminded me how happy she was about this at least daily. Eventually I went back to the local shop. George looked at it and said I could leave it, but he wasn’t sure how to remove it, he would think about it, he might break it taking it off, and didn’t know when he would do it. Essentially zero hope offered. Having no options I left him the part and resigned myself to weeks passing. I went back and cleaned up the cockpit to make Victoria happy.
The next morning George texted me that he had it off. He had to make a small custom metal part, he welded it to a corroded part that needed to come out, and somehow pulled it off.
I now have the propeller completely apart, and am cleaning everything before I put it back together with new parts. I’m going to have to clean the corroded part carefully. Stay tuned for the end of this project.
The last thing I’ll mention is for the first time I’ve had one of the lines attaching us to the dock break!
As you can see it is still holding on with one strand….but it has essentially failed. The boat is secured with 8 lines (the 2 critical ones at the back have a safety line each), so one breaking is not an emergency, but obviously I repaired it right away. We had a few days of the boat moving quite a bit. Yesterday afternoon I heard a ‘pop’ outside but then nothing unusual….and I think this was the line breaking. Probably it had chafed through a bit before it broke. I use chafe protection on the most important dock lines but not on these.
Here is a better picture of the rope that broke:
I think this is 15mm 16-strand nylon rope. The general rule is to use 1mm of rope thickness per length of your boat in meters, so because this is slightly undersized I doubled the line to give twice the strength. The line is supposed to have a breaking point of around 7000lbs so it must have been quite the tugging that broke it!
Anyway we are all fixed now and I can continue to work on the propeller. I expect we will head out to sail in a few weeks. Victoria wants to wait until it gets a bit warmer, which means 22+ and sunny for a while. It has been warm but rainy here lately.
Adventures on Spruzzo 