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Maintenance and Repairs

Major care tasks that may interest other owners

Gel coat cracks?

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We just noticed that Rainshadow has a bunch of small cracks on the topsides near the toe rail. Yikes!

Fresh Water Tank Repair

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The problem was that our fiberglass fresh water tank (located in the keel under the cockpit sole, about 100 gallons volume) was blistered and had spider cracks. It was still sound, but the water quality was poor due to the styrene leaching into the water from the venting blisters.

We figured we had the following repair options:

Yamaha 8 HP Outboard Thermostat

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We have a Yamaha 8 HP 2-stroke outboard for our dinghy (1999 model 8SMHX). I reported earlier about how to change its water pump impeller (here). We did that because the telltale wasn’t flowing water, and it still wasn’t after we serviced the water pump. So we took off the head cover to look at the thermostat.

Yamaha 8HP Outboard Water Pump Service

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Our dinghy came with a Yamaha 8 HP 2-stroke outboard (1999 model 8MSHX). We we started it up for the first time, there wasn’t any water coming out the telltale hole so we decided it was time to service the water pump.

Now the Primary Winches Go Click, Click, Click

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Winches on boats need servicing occasionally – yearly according to the manufacturers. They’ve got a lot of bearings in them, and gears if they are two-speed winches, all of which do much better with some nice clean waterproof marine grease. When you don’t service them for a while, the grease becomes like sticky tar. Then the winches are too hard to turn, and the pawls inside go thunk, thunk, thunk.

Ready to go… maybe not

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Yesterday, we were all set for our first overnight cruise. The engine was running, Van was ready to cast off the docking lines. He was telling me the plan, but I was preoccupied. “Are you listening to me?” he asked.

Cleaning the Fuel Tank and Polishing the Diesel

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We pulled a sample of diesel from the bottom of the tank to learn about what’s going on down there. At first, the fuel looked pretty clean, but then we scraped the bottom of the tank with the sampling tube, and a bunch of gunk came up.

Cleaning the Heat Exchanger

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Rainshadow’s Perkins 4-108 diesel engine uses sea water (otherwise known as ‘raw water’) to cool the lube oil and engine coolant in a two-part heat exchanger. General lore is that you’re supposed to periodically remove the heat exchanger and clean the tubes that carry the sea water through the housings. Rainshadow’s heat exchanger had never been cleaned in all her long 35 years. So we decided to give it a go

Replacing the Lavac inlet hose spigot

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While working on replumbing the head, the inlet hose spigot snapped off inside the Lavac Zenith toilet. Yikes! It left a piece inside, so we were left with trying to figure out how to get that piece out, and what to do about replacing it. The Lavac toilet is just too nice to abandon over a little failure like this. I’m posting this here in case anyone else encounters this problem with their 35 year old plastic part snapping.

Up Up Up

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While Luke was home from university for spring break, we decided that with his help, it was time to send Van up the mast. We had some burned out light bulbs, and Van wanted to inspect the rigging up there.