I think I owe everyone a pretty good update here so let me start by giving this post a title:
“And Then This Happened”
I booked a week and a day off of my job – September 30 which was Thursday was the first annual memorial day of a new type in Canada, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation between indigenous people and, I guess, everyone else. Yesterday was Thanksgiving here, so I took Friday and the intervening week off and resolved not to touch a laptop until they paid me to do so again so the only updates anyone has gotten would be if they follow me on some platform that’s really easy to update by mobile. That’s the reason for the lengthy silence, anyway.
And now…on with our story.
First some build detail stuff:
How did I guess the hull weight as accurately as I did? Simple: cheating. Here I am weighing it by hand a couple of weeks ago:
So I had a pretty idea what half of it weighed, anyway. I knew it was light.
Here was a good “I’m not a rocket scientist” move: I’ve never had a motor with hand cranks before, to snug it down. So I didn’t think about that when I made the little bracket.
How did I think they were going to turn and flop and turn? There’s not enough room! Duhhhokay, well, we mount the motor to the plate, then mount the assembly to the boat, I guess. Unless there’s another solution, which I immediately discovered:
Just tighten it down really hard, and you can shear the handles right off and punch your hand into the aluminum bracket and now a 3/8” wrench lets you turn them with ease. Another problem solved with brute force.
Here’s a quick bit of detail for you on my weird personal take on open spaces under decks…I wanted the ability to prevent water from getting in and weighing me down in the improbable event of taking a ton of water on board. I bought a pack of kayak bungs for about $20 and employed two on the actual kayak where I needed them, and 5 on this boat.
Here’s three stopping water from leaving the bilge and moving forward. Easily removed, no chance of excess air pressure like sealed bilges, but almost impossible for water to gain entry except by catastrophic hull failure. Very simple. That picture is a few weeks old, the bilge is a bit cleaner since then. But that’s the only pic I have that shows the bungs.
I also use them like this:
If the hatch lid isn’t jammed at all, they make good handles. If it is, they just pop out and you can get a finger in there and give it a yank. But it keeps most of the rain and spray out.
I can’t remember if I mentioned this but the boat fits in the garage with the motor on, which is great!
Well, it mostly fits.
Close enough!
Then it was just some little detail stuff like the motorwell (which now has a drain and is fully glassed but didn’t/isn’t in this pic)
Get the grab rail all fancy
Kid all excited…
And onto the water!
October 1: burning fuel, having fun, hunting lingcod in the reefs around my place.
October 2, same basic plan…
“And Then This Happened”
Heck.
Submerged log, maybe 6” down below the surface. Hit it around 15 knots, I think. Was just moving between reefs fishing them and had left the lock on, which is flimsy…looking. But apparently very sturdy. I highly recommend the old OMC locking system, it’s apparently very, very strong.
I also recommend the motors, though, because apparently they’re unkillable.
I roped it back onto the transom by running the fender lines through those rod holder holes, got the engine running, and drove it home six miles like this.
I had dinner and possibly some kind of beverage to improve my state of mind, and got to work in the alley behind my house.
Probably need a new one of these:
And some other bits
Hmm…what to do. The same guy who got me the intake and carb offered to send anything I needed but he took months to send that stuff. He told me to send him a list of parts, so I did, but then he said he’d been sick and hadn’t been into the shop in a few days and I could immediately see that turning into weeks of chasing him around so I hit up a couple of local contacts as well as FB marketplace.
Well, that turned up paydirt pretty quick…I blew a whopping 150 ice pesos and some gas money and launched my latest charity: the Cracked Ribs Home for Wayward Outboards.
Note the inverted Evinrude 25 just visible through the doorway. It was probably the best of the three but came with a driveshaft which was seized in the cam, so cost very little. I picked up the ’76-ish Evinrude 20 Tuesday morning and began stripping it down, and the ’84 Tuesday evening. I yanked the lower off the ’84, tipped up upside down started soaking the driveshaft in penetrant that night.
Wednesday morning it was still plenty stuck. I was a little worried and began thinking about whether I could assemble an entire waterpump etc back on from underneath. I also noticed when I slid the driveshaft out of the lower that there was a little needle bearing that had popped loose down in the gearcase. Okay, that’s coming apart. Heck and double heck. I continued disassembling motors until about noon. I didn’t even stop long enough to turn on a podcast or something, I just went at max speed, heating nuts, pouring penetrant, whacking stuff with hammers, drilling out frozen studs, dremeling broken-off screw extractors (2) and also engaged in periodic fits of swearing but not as much as you’d guess. I just felt like I had zero time to waste because I wanted a running motor and each frustrating thing that happened, like shearing off a stud, was more time, and getting angry was just going to slow me down more.
I really wanted that driveshaft out on the Evinrude but HATE the idea of putting vice grips on and hammering them. I just hate it. But I couldn’t come up with a better solution, so I just kept working on the other two motors to see if I could make headway there instead.
I wasn’t sure which was going to be the fastest route, repairing the Johnson, or starting the ’84 Evinrude. There were a lot of frozen bolts and screws (seriously OMC WHY SCREWS ON A MACHINE THAT WILL SIT IN SALT WATER – you have to see the problems coming, it’s two different metals and anyway, screws, f’ing screws, god damn it) on everything and every inch was a battle. I worked on the midsection of the old Evinrude to try to get all the parts I could, and at the same time, thought about the stuck driveshaft on the ’84.