September 19, 2011

It was a hectic week full of ups and downs.  Had what looked like a good cash offer on the house that fell through because grampa didn't like it.  Quite an emotional bounce.  Between showings I worked in the shop finishing up the outboard, making a new fuel pickup tube, building a glass rack to add to the dish rack, and cutting some plywood to reinforce the dinghy transom.

The original pickup tube in the outboard's fuel tank was flimsy plastic and had fallen apart.  Heck, that could have been the original reason the outboard didn't run.  After the quickfix didn't work, I decided to do it right and build one out of metal if possible.  The tricky part was that the tube needed to come out of the inside of a male pipe thread fitting.  It took about an hour in the hardware store to finally find bits that could be put together to work, it just took some soldering with a torch.

I now had everything ready to see if the outboard would run after the carburetor rebuild and other work.  If it ran well, I'd pretty it up by removing some ratty old service decals and adding a new coat of paint.  I loaded everything up into the truck and headed out to Hidden Harbor.  By the time I arrived it had gotten pretty darn hot and the place had been invaded by butterflies.

When the big moment came to test the motor in Scott's water barrel, of course I had an audience.

Nothing happened after the first couple of pulls.  Fighting back panic, I suspected the new kill switch key I had gotten was not thick enough to activate the ignition.  I disconnected the secret brown wire that circumvented the kill switch and tried again.  The motor roared to life!  A couple of turns of the idle adjustment screw to bring the rpm's down and she ran like a top.  Even the transmission linkage was fine.  Life is good!

I brought my outboard and a smile back to the shop where I knocked off the corrosion and repainted everything but the cover with the closest match I could find in Pep Boys.  I also fabricated a new kill switch key from thicker HDPE, which I'll test later.

When I had finished with the outboard, I built a new mahogany glass rack to go with the new dish rack.  Again, everything was salvaged or leftover, so it cost me nothing but elbow grease.  It fit fine and looked pretty good, but I need to add some molding to the front edge and find shorter wine glasses.

Then it was back to HH to mold a plywood reinforcement for the dinghy transom.  The 5 hip outboard was a bit much for the dink, and there was a crack in the fiberglass lip where the engine mounts.  The P.O., as usual, had done a quick-and-dirty make-do, which was both ugly and not strong enough.  My plan was to use the dinghy transom as a mold on which to laminate thin plywood to conform to the curve.  I repaired the crack by first filling it with epoxy and thickener, then laminating two layers of cloth over the crack and around the lip.  When that was cured, I laid up three layers of 1/8 inch plywood glued together with epoxy, the whole sandwich clamped to the dinghy transom.  Messy, but it turned out about as well as I had expected.  After some trimming and filling, it'll work just fine and should look good too.

While I waited for the epoxy to cure, I decided to tackle the autopilot issues with my new volt meter.  Well, the damn thing worked again the minute I turned it on and continued to work fine for the several days I was there.  The only issue was that the breaker switch for it seemed to cut out one night.  But the next day, that was fine too.  Loose connection shorting the circuit intermittently?  The other possibility is that when we were out on the water last week, I was too impatient to wait the second or two it takes for the autopilot to come up after turning the switch.  Anyway, as long as it's working, I can't trouble shoot it.  So, having bought more fluid and the bits to make a new reservoir, I decided to do a very complete and thorough bleed of the system with some help from Ron, who pushed steering buttons on the autopilot and turned the wheel repeatedly while I cracked connections and bleed points.  An hour later the steering felt much tighter.  I continued to test and crank away for the next day and a half until no more bubbles appeared in the reservoir tube.   Much less freeplay in the steering and the autopilot now was able to turn the rudder smoothly rather than unevenly as before.  One mystery remained:  after the system 'rested' for a while, the autopilot would turn the rudder lock-to-lock in six seconds two or three times, then slow down to take at least twelve seconds.  The motor winding down like the battery was going dead, but the charger was on and it had a full 14 volts the whole time.  I tried this several times with the same results.  Time to call Wil at WH to see what gives.