Tanks done and tested. Time to put things together again.

 English  3 Responses »
Feb 092012
 

I remember when the tanks were pressure tested in the yard. As the pressure increased there were plates going “Boooink” as they adapted to the pressure. I should have taken that as a sign that something was wrong, but at the time I was thinking that the tanks would never be exposed to that kind of pressure in real life. Now I know it was a sign of possible movement that I should have listened to.

Today the second tank was completed and pressurized. Silence. Nothing moves. Solid. Good. I’m happy. Now I just need to put the interior back together. And wash my bloodstains from the boat after I cut through half of my finger when a drill bit broke earlier today. No worries, it seems I heal quickly these days. I’ll just put on some groovy music to get into a good mood for interior remount. It feels a lot better to put things together than it did tearing them down!


 Posted by Jesper at 20:17  Tagged with: ,

Tank work coming along. Slowly but surely.

 English  3 Responses »
Feb 062012
 

All sorts of factors are adding themselves on top of the Bahia tempo. The local Military Police are on strike. This totally screws up traffic in the city. Takes hours for my welder to get here in the morning. The army is trying to secure things but they are not very good at it. There has been an increase of murders and robbery in the area according to the newspapers.

Doesn’t feel any different here in the city centre though. But I wonder what will happen if the police are still on strike when the carnival starts…

And then there’s the heat. The equipment thinks it’s hot too. The old-school HF Ignition unit has had its cover taken off, and my small car heater is used as a fan to try to stop it from overheating:

But anyway, the work feels good enough. Now the tank plates are quite solid. They will stop moving, I am pretty sure of that:


 Posted by Jesper at 15:52  Tagged with: ,

Interior dismount depression.

 English  4 Responses »
Jan 262012
 

Now about half of the interior is completely dismounted and the boat is a complete mess. It took longer than I thought to do due to the massive heat. I simply had to go out and cool down pretty often. And now I am in a bit of a depression because I keep thinking about how this time really should have been spent fixing all the small details of the boat that I want to perfect, not tearing down stuff to make structural repairs. But that’s life…

Yesterday we went hunting for materials. Three different major aluminium outlets. The last one did have good 25mm L-profiles, which is what I want to use as stiffeners on the tanks. They had no idea what alloy it was, though. So we took a small test piece, did a bit of welding on it in Roberto (The welders) shop. And now I am testing it in concentrated salt water to make sure it is OK, and not some 3000 series aluminium that will corrode instantly…


 Posted by Jesper at 13:17  Tagged with: , ,

Teardown started

 English  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

I have started to tear down the interior to clear the way for welding reinforcements to the ballast tanks. The forward starboard toilet is now done.

So far I only had to saw one wall panel apart. There were some spots where the Estonian builders had actually followed instructions and not glued everything together. And actually, one joint where there was glue despite it wasn’t supposed to be there. But they had glued before removing the protective film on the panels, so the glue didn’t stick at all. Good for me!

You can see the tank plating in the image. This plate is about 800x800mm, which is too large as I have now learned.

You can also see the first temporary fix we made at sea outside the Swedish coast in September. Very ugly glueing :-D because the interior was not removed at that time, which made work extremely difficult.

The plan is to put reinforcement stringers on all these plates at about 300mm distance, and re-weld the cracks.


 Posted by Jesper at 21:26  Tagged with: , ,

Finally something goes right…

 English  2 Responses »
Jun 292011
 

The last 3 weeks have been slightly too troublesome for my taste. Progress on the final to-do list has been very slow and sometimes almost backwards… Especially since I am trying to get some sailing done every now and then.

But today I got a nice verification that at least I am not completely lost as a designer. The ballast tanks filled on the calculated time (10 minutes) and resulted in the calculated heel (8°). Nice.


 Posted by Jesper at 16:43  Tagged with: , ,
 Older Entries
© 2011 Journeyman Stockholm AB Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha