Month: September 2020

I coated the port engine with rustlock to help prevent future rust. I then used a high temperature paint to add a new fresh coat. I let it dry for the day, then the next day I added another coat of paint.

 Our transducer came back from california where it was being repaired and updated on Thursday. We then set to work getting everything ready and set up to re-install it. We bolted the transducer to the mounting plate and used 5200 on all the bolts to keep it sealed from water. We let it sit overnight to dry. The next day we installed it in the bottom of the transducer well. We used pipe dope and teflon tape to make a good seal around the mounting bolts. We decided we would let this sit over the weekend to dry and we would add water and test everything out on Monday.

This week we worked on cleaning up the port engine room. We scrubbed everything down with degreaser. We also cleaned the bilges. Once the engine was cleaned I removed all the rust from it and prepared it to be painted. I also found 5 different wires that were just cut and not dead ended properly along the engine room wall. I tested them to make sure there was no power coming from them. Then I taped them off and marked them so they can be removed later. We did a test on our fore peak bilge and found a hole about a quarter of an inch around on the overboard pipe. I made up a patch and fixed it.

We were working on Tatiana, the ship’s small boat. There has been a problem with the motor tilt. There are two controls, one on the console and the other is on the outboard motor itself. I started trouble shooting the trim. While I was working on it I noticed one of the ground weirs from the engine to the hull was starting to overheat. This meant there was a grounding problem as well. I went though and tested all the weirs with an amp clamp meter. To find where the electricity was finding its way back through the hull. There are two batteries on the boat, a start battery and an auxiliary battery. The start battery was grounded to the aluminum hull with two weirs for some reason. I looked closer and tested all the battery cables and discovered that they were wired completely wrong. The tilt was getting its power though the starter cable from the start battery. The problem is the negative return was attached to the auxiliary battery negative. The auxiliary negative cabe was hooked up to the start battery. So the two were switched. This is why the power was finding its way back to the stat battery through the weirs that grounded it to the hull. The fact that the battery was grounded to the hull was weird. There is no good reason for it on this boat let alone the fact it was done with two wires is even stranger. The batters should have been wired in parallel which they weren’t which gave me a hit to what the two ground weirs were from. Whoever did the wiring for the battery last used the paralleling wires as a ground and then switched up the two negative cables. I re-wired everything correctly and removed the battery ground from the hull. There is no good reason to ground the battery on this aluminum boat with two batteries as the only power source. First it caused me problems with figuring out the tilt issue. It’s also a fire hazard because the grounding wire that the power was going through was too small for the load and started to smoke from all the amps going through it. This could start a fire if it went on long enough. Another problem this presents is the battery ground could cause a shock hazard. If you were touching the hull and then touched the engine or something else that was getting power to it you could get a shock. Without a battery ground this would be impossible the only way you could get shocked is if you were touching the negative battery post while touching the engine or something else receiving power. Once I finished rewiring the batteries I tested everything out and everything worked.

This week we did our load tests on the ship’s cranes. They need to be able to hold 125% of their load limit for 5 minutes to pass the test for our NSF inspection. We have giant wheels from train cars that weigh around 800 pounds each. These wheels are normally used to anchor buoys and are stored on campus. We only needed 5 and some extra smaller weights to get to 4,125 pounds. Both cranes were able to hold the wait and pass the test.

During our trip we got a lot of lobster traps and fishing gear caught around our propellers. So we had to dive in today to cut off all the lines so we would be ready to go out whenever we needed to. We have dive gear on board the ship for this job and I have all my dive certifications. Each propeller had a lot more line on them than I thought they would. We cut and unwrapped all the lines. In some spots we had to use scrapers because the lines caused so much friction they melted to the prop shaft. We piled up all the cut lines up on the deck. 

We changed the oil and serviced our starboard generator . We change out the raw water impeller. The old one looked like it was starting to crack. We took apart the air intake and the heat exchanger and cleaned them out. We also took a look at the turbo’s bearings to make sure they were ok. We then cleaned it up and did a little touch up painting.