Another little bit of prep work...none of this is very interesting I'm sure but I am going to try to put something in here every day just to force me to keep chipping away at the million tasks that make up one complete boat.
One factor that's been weighing on my mind: can I find the parts necessary to get 35 hp out of the old Johnson? I think so. I talked to a friend of mine in Ontario who works as an outboard mechanic; he found me a carb and intake. I told him that if he did a rebuild on the carb and sent it out with the intake all freshened up, I’d give him a scope I had kicking around that I don’t think I was ever going to use. It took a bit of prodding to get him to sort through his parts inventory, but today he sent pics of the carb. The linkage looks identical; I bet everything will bolt up fine. Worst case scenario is that it doesn’t and I can’t use it, but I still have a 20hp to play with. But my strong suspicion is that this will all bolt together fine.
I’ll ship the scope in the next few days, but I want to wait until I hear he’s actually rebuilt the carb, because it took him two weeks from when I asked about...
Okay, let's get something out of the way. There are going to be about four million "johnson" jokes that I'll have to either intentionally make, or just wait for somebody else to. In order to prevent this from taking over half the posts as I write them, I'm going to toss out a bunch right now so the temptation to reuse them later in the thread is reduced.
"I asked about his Johnson."
"I would rather have had a longer shaft Johnson but this'll do."
"For a small Johnson it sure does the job."
"I just don't understand why my Johnson won't work anymore."
"Two strokes is all my Johnson needs."
"I'm a little concerned that my Johnson is insufficiently lubed."
"I asked my neighbour to help me manhandle my Johnson into place."
"I spent most of the day in the back yard, playing with my Johnson. Eventually my neighbours called the police to report a disturbance."
Okay, that ought to prevent too many guys from thinking up lewd stuff about my Johnson.
Anyway yeah, not shipping that scope until I hear something from the outboard mechanic. But hopefully that's not too long a wait. If my Johnson doesn't get a bit of love soon, I'm not sure what I'll do.
I guess since we're in the gutter I'll tell you about ordering epoxy. I'm using MarinEpoxy from the somewhat unfortunately-acronymed Boat Builder Central. Man, the internet changed a lot of things. There was a time you could go to the ATM and get out money for BBC and nobody would think anything of it, but anyway, their epoxy is good stuff. I've used a lot of it. When I used to live in Vancouver I always ordered from them but I could have it sent to Point Roberts and just go pick it up. That's out of the question these days. I'd have ordered everything from them but shipping to a dock in Nanaimo would have been around $800 plus customs brokerage. I'll still have to sort that part out but Air Express International seems willing to ship epoxy to the island, so that's where BBC is sending the epoxy. I like dealing with the guys at Boat Builder Central; the service is excellent and they have a forum I've learned a lot at over the years. I started reading it around twenty years ago, before I built my first ever boat, and now I'm a bit loyal to them. Still, if I can save $500 by breaking up shipments, you bet I will.
By detailing out everything and grabbing stuff in Canada when possible I think I got my total shipping costs down to around half the original $800+brokerage, so that's pretty decent and even though I didn't physically build anything today, each step counts toward the finish line.