2008 Week 47 in Review
November 16 to November 22, 2008
Maritime networking at Brunch
I occasionally host brunch for 200 or so of my closest friends. Lots of maritime folks came to last Sunday's brunch. Brian the shipwright, Grant the captain of the Thea Foss, Diana the maritime museum specialist, Kim of Jack Tar Magazine, Jake from the CWB, and many more showed up for hash browns, bloody marys, and the bonfire out back. It was a lot of work, but it was good to see so many folks having a good time.
Moving the Skillful
Later in the week, we moved the Skillful, the little tug that I bought back in Week 44. It's been moored at Pacific Fishermen, but we don't want to wear out our welcome anywhere so we're going to move it around occasionally.
We took it for a cruise through the ship canal and into Lake Union. The throttle control in the wheelhouse is busted, so we cruised at idle the entire way (except when I manually throttled it up for some quick donuts in the canal), but it's a great little boat:
We rafted it up to the Arthur Foss, in a short-term agreement with Northwest Seaport. I love it - it looks so tiny!
Continuing work on the Catalyst
I wrote last week about how three of the main bearings are bad and need to be re-babbitted; one of them is ripple-y and two of them are all cracked up, including one of the small ones that sits beside the air compressor bay. I brought these up to Everett Engineering Inc last week, but they're still too swamped to get them done when I need them! They were going to send them to Utah again, but I sent them to St. Louis Bearing in Wilmington, California. I've worked with them before and want to throw work their way whenever possible.
We're asking St. Louis Bearing for an extra step in this work. Since all of the main bearings are worn down a bit, we are going to have the three newly-poured bearings machined down a little, to keep the crank sitting straight and in the same place. If we had the newly-poured bearings machined to the original specifications, the crankshaft would get lifted up at those places and bend slightly, since the bearings that haven't been newly poured would be a little lower. The extra machining will get us close to the shape we need, and then we'll fit them exactly with a little hand-scraping. This will hopefully save me the hours and hours of hand-scraping that I did back in Week 36. Stay tuned to see how well it works.
After getting the bearings sent out, I started cleaning pistons. It's a dirty job: first, I put them into a custom cradle that I built at the shop, which supports it while I push out the wrist pin. One side of the wrist pin is bigger than the other, so I have to push it out just so with a lot of pressure. I want the piston really well-supported while I do this, since the pressure could crack it otherwise. Once the piston is all disassembled, I put all the parts into the hot tank for a few hours, then washed them in the sink. I removed the piston rings by prying the ends out slightly, wrapping the ends with rags, and pulling on the rags to open the ring just enough to slide it up and off the piston. I broke one ring that was stuck pretty bad, and noticed lots of wear on a few others, so I ordered 12 new rings from Safety Seal in Texas. I'll replace the top two compression rings on each piston with a new ring, which should get here in about two weeks.
Later in the week, I measured the ring gap of each ring by pushing them into a cylinder one at a time. I jammed feeler gauges, pieces of metal that are a determined thickness, into the ring gap. If it was loose in the gap, I went the next size up, until I got a light drag when I jammed it in. Then, I read the thickness of that gauge, marked it in the book, and marked it onto the ring:
The ring gap tells me two things: how big the gap is, since too much can give you blow-by and make the engine run inefficiently, and how worn the ring is. As a ring wears down, it expands against the cylinder wall and the gap gets bigger. I can compare the ring gap of the used ring to that of a new ring and determine how much the used ring has worn.
Then, I started checking the sizes of the cylinders relative to each other by putting one ring into each one and measuring its ring gap. I found that there's a seventeen-thousandths variation between the cylinders. This is sort of medium for variance between cylinders; I'll have to pick the biggest rings for the biggest cylinder and so on, but it's not that big a deal.
The last spare pressure-balanced Washington injector?
We've got a pressure-balanced injector for a Washington Iron Works engine here in the shop:
Ed Ehler (local maritime guy with a finger in every pot) found it while going through his junk pile and gave it to Dan. Washington stopped manufacturing the pressure-balanced injector type around 1928, after they started making the far-superior spring-balanced injectors, and the only engine that we know of that still has the pressure-balanced type is at the Kodiak Maritime Museum.
Dan's talking about how he's going to strip it for parts, but I'm trying to convince him to keep it intact because it's the only spare pressure-balanced injector left that we know of. It'll probably end up cannibalized to make a spare injector for the David B or the San Juan, since many of the parts used in the pressure-balanced injectors are the same as in the spring-balanced ones. The David B already has two spare injectors and we haven't heard from the San Juan for a while, so maybe I can still convince Dan to keep the pressure-balanced one. We'll see.
Pacific Marine Expo and Winners of the OTM Inc Sticker Contest!
I went to the Pacific Marine Expo on Friday to check in with the greater maritime industry. I saw some folks who I don't see anywhere else, handed out cards for Jack Tar Magazine's Sexy Women of Maritime Calendar (coming this December; ordering details on the website soon), and decided that I need a booth there next year.
After the show, we headed to the Central Saloon to judge entries in the 2008 Old Tacoma Marine Inc Sticker Contest:
The competition was stiff, the pictures were great, and the nachos were many, but we finally selected our winners.
Thanks to all those who contributed! The winners have been notified - congratulations to those who won! Stay tuned for details about the 2009 OTM Inc Sticker Contest!
