Friday October 5: Projects - Still at Matt and Wendy's!!

The projects are moving forward. There's not much going on so I'll just describe what it is that is holding us up here in North Carolina!

First, though, as a note: we are living a new kind of life here. Usually up by 7 (Steve - not me) and a walk with Fozzie (unless Wendy was already up and taking him), breakfast at Ziggy's (this is the ONLY choice - but it's good), ride the ferry to the boat, spend the day here, ride the ferry back with stops along the way for whatever anyone needs since we have Wendy's car all day, Steve or Wendy makes dinner, and finally watch some live or recorded football (we are at halftime in the Oregon-Washington State game from last Saturday night!) and off to bed.

The picture above is the cutlass bearing that resides inside the flange that connects to the shaft tube. Who knew there was a bearing in there?? Definitely not us. The old one of course was toast so Don replaced this bearing as well as the one in the stern tube. We are now ready to replace the shaft.

First though the shaft needed cleaned up. Steve took on the job - making great headway with the metal polish. Mmmm... quite a bit of pitting. This doesn't look like a good thing....

Might as well replace this while we are doing all of this. So off we went with the shaft to Beaufort to the marine supply place. They'll have a new one cut to fit by Monday or Tuesday at the latest. Maybe one of these days we'll actually get back into the water :-)

In the meantime, the work on the leaking shaft continues. This is a picture of what it looked like after Steve dug all of the rotted wood out.

The next step was for Dave to use an epoxy to seal off all of the wet wood. This will allow him to seal this area completely with fiberglass.

This is the same area with a material filling the space. I don't remember the name of it but it won't absorb water. Next step will be to fiberglass this entire box as well as the sides and bottom of this area. In theory, this will keep the water which is leaking around the shaft tube OUT of the boat.




More progress later. In the meantime, Matt and Wendy probably wonder if they will ever be alone in their home ever again - we were staying at their place for a week and a half when we returned from Canada, left for 4 days and have been there now for almost two weeks. Yikes .... guess they have some idea of what it's like for parents whose kids keep coming back home :-) Thanks, Wendy and Matt!!!