Ahoy Jim, Your new boat sounds like a large antique wooden motorboat. You will need all the help you can get.
A friend of mine had a pre-WW2 Trumpy 86' wooden motorsailer and it ended up killing him. He got heat prostration working on the planking in the summer in Florida, was taken to the local hospital where they gave a full-fledged stroke using a catheter, after which he went back home to Michigan and died. The boat sold and sank at the dock in Green Cove Springs. It is still there I think. The new owners apparently didn't understand that wooden boats need effective, reliable bilge pumps to stay alive. I suggest you have multiple bilge pumps, staggered at different heights, with counters to keep track of the number of operations per day, alarms (audio and visual) to warn you when (not if) the lower ones fail, and operating from independent power supplies. DO NOT connect your boat to dock water. Fill your tanks and draw from them. Most boats I have seen sunk at marinas were sunk by dock water. I can help with the diesel fuel system. If you can't find my fuel system messages in the archives let me know and I will send you some input. If you ever consider fiberglassing the hull I saw it done on a sailboat called Lord Jim. The hull was stabilized by stapling on with monel staples, and set in epoxy, two courses of wood strips (about 1/4" thick & 1 1/2" wide) in opposite directions at 45* to the horizontal. This is to keep the hull from working and breaking the fiberglas/wood bond. I think they used fiberglas/polyester but there are more flexible materials available which are used with epoxy (which is more flexible and has better bond strength) instead of polyester to reduce the tendancy to break the glass/wood bond as the wood swells and shrinks with temp/moisture changes. Or you can do it like they did the USS Constellation (docked in Baltimore), They assumed the interior framing was so old as to be non-structual so they strip planked the hull (after straightening it out with jacks under the keel) with 2x6 strip planking, the first two layers at 45* to the horizontal, then a horizontal layer on the outside that looks like planking. I don't remember if they kept the original planking or not. The process was written up in Wooden Boat magzine years ago. Norm S/V Bandersnatch Lying Julington Creek FL N30 07.68 W081 38.47 > Kat and I have spent the last 9 years living about a 35' "Cruising" > Cal, Bill Lapworth's design for a comfortable long range (150 Gal of > diesel, 110 of water) cruiser. It's been a lot of fun, if we didn't > travel as widely as we'd have liked, we did enjoy what travel we > managed. But we have just made the transition to a large motorboat, a > 1955 Constellation, and find we have a lot of new lessons to learn. > Two diesels and a lot of storage among them! It's like living in a > smallish apartment. > > > Anyway, looking forward to lurking and learning new stuff, about our new path. > > _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
