At the Headwaters

In the winter months, it is too dreadfully cold, and just too dark, to work on the cold metal of the boat.  Along with that, the cold zaps the materials, hardware and tools:  adhesives freeze, electronics don’t work, and materials become brittle.  I did grab an old antique Kenmore space heater out of our back alley, but the amount of heat generated couldn’t compete with blast of winter. 

I worked a bit in the basement of the house, and was able to recover the flooring of the front sleeping cabin, and build in a storage bay and hatch.  I used auto upholstery and put two inch foam batten underneath for padding.  I cleaned and refinished the table as well, which was covered with a vinyl of some sort; under was the cool old formica top — very nice!

I also made six cushions for the interior seats.  I had no real sewing experience, so it was a bit of a trick, but they turned out alright.  They aren’t perfect (or professional) but they all are solidly constructed sewed together and they actually fit, so I’m satisfied.

This early spring, when it was still cool but the worst was over, I began stripping and sanding down a nice wooden ladder I had pulled out of the garbage the previous spring.  Every year Bloomington, MN has their curbside clean-up time, in which residents get rid of their big, non-garbage can items.  This is a time of the year I loveingly refer to as “dumpster days” and it is an annual event of perusing people’s garbage.  Yes, it is a bit weird, but I am not alone in this endeavor, in fact there is quite the competition to get to the good items first.  There is a whole subculture surrounding dumpster days, in which intricate timing, unique social rules and salvaging skills (knowing which piles to automatically skip over, and which are likely to contain hidden gems) all come in to play.  In a truly wasteful display, people throw away perfectly good items; I’ve grabbed bikes, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, beautiful cross country skis, tools and construction materials. 

I also purchased some salvaged maple wood flooring from the Reuse It Center.  It looked like it came from a gym floor as it had red, blue and black lines of a basketball court.  Along with the lines, it had, of course, a nice solid finish on it. I first tried to use my neighbor Wayne’s random-orbital sander — the same I used for the ladder.  While it worked, the finish was too thick, and it took about a half an hour to do 3 feet of one plank.  At that rate, it would have taken about 80 hours. 

It took me longer to drive down to Shakopee to pick up a surface planer from a rental store than to do the actual planing.  It went super slick, and took about a half an hour to plow through the whole bunch.  The worst part was the banshee scream of the machine . . . it’s lucky my hearing is gone so I can’t hear my neighbors cursing me.  But I’ve got nice, smooth, ready to be sealed maple wood flooring. 

When I took possession of the boat, it came complete with a full gas tank.  Full of what I’m not sure, but it smelled like sweet vomit from a child that had eaten too much licorice.  Nasty.  Part of the smell was from the aluminum insides corroding and rusting.  I took it out, and replaced it with a comparable 28 gallon plastic tank.  As you can see from the pictures, when I installed it in the summer of 2004, it was on a 98 degree day – with the inside of the hay mow even warmer. 

The engine is a Volvo-Penta Aquamatic 80 I/O:  a four cylinder, overhead valve, water cooled, 80 horsepower machine.  The Volvo-Penta website indicates that this small engine was made for “high speed, lightweight boats” – not exactly a good description of this boat.

The engine cover was only partially on, for who knows how many years, and it was quite a mess.  Rusted, covered with leaves and other junk, with various hoses and wires disconnected, it looked a bit rough.  I did quite a bit of general cleaning on it, and also made some semblance of order out of the wiring, but since my father is quite proficient with engines, I left this project for him.  He did some other minor maintenance – changed the oil, replaced the hoses and plugs – before doing any major work. 

He tried to crank it by hand to see if the cylinders were loose – they weren’t.  He tried with a wrench, as well, but they were pretty frozen.  If they were really seized up, we were sorta screwed, so I was hoping he could get it turning.  We left it for quite a while, but the question of whether the engine was any good was eating at both of us, one Saturday in August 2004, he, my uncle Jack and a fully charged battery went out to try an engine defibrillation. They removed the spark plugs, hooked up the battery, and then, using a screwdriver to make a connection, tried to crank the engine.  We all disappointingly looked at each other when the first and then second tries were failures.  On the third try, it unseized, throwing motor oil through the air and spattering the inside wall of the transom as well as my dad’s face.   Very cool.   

The normal approach on this boat project has been to a) look at an item that needs repair and determine how it previously functioned, b) read about it through books and the internet, c) talk a bit with the local experts, d) formulate a repair plan, e) do the repair and then, when it didn’t work or wasn’t quite right, f) do it again. This was the approach with the windshield, and then some.

The old windshield was a 1/4-inch acrylic in about three broken pieces. It was bolted into the frame with 3/8 inch bolts and square head nuts that were now completely rusted out. After removing the framing and shield, we put it back together to use as a template. I bought a 4 x 10 piece of 1/8 inch acrylic from the local plastics supplier. This length was longer than their standard 8 foot length, so I paid a bit more, but it was still fairly cheap at $60 a sheet. Instead of having them cut it in half, which would incur an additional charge, I just took the whole thing, and subsequently had enough for two – just in case. It wasn’t as thick as the previous shield, but in my non-scientific reasoning I had determined this was okay, because there was not a lot of weight that it was holding up and it didn’t need to be super-high impact resistant because the boat would be moving at such low speeds. I cut it using my neighbor’s very nice jigsaw. With the right settings and blade, it cut perfectly with no chips or cracks.

The windshield was a wrap around style, so the ends bent around the corners of the front of the boat. Bending acrylic can be done cold, or with heat (thermo-forming), depending on the thickness of the material and how far one wants to bend it. There are a whole set of equations to work with to figure how far the material can be bent cold or hot. Generally speaking, the thinner the material and shorter the bend, the better the ability to cold form. Conversely, thicker material and sharper bends require thermo-forming, and more concern about the breaking point. Logical.

But I have never been one to put much weight into mathematical equations, so I just decided to cut it to the right size and cold bend it in. To the point, it broke as soon as we tried to get it around the corner. I had the second half of the piece, so I wasn’t deterred at all. While there was quite a bit of time spent staring at the windshield frame, there still were no mathematical equations involved, no sir.

I did a little more reading, bought a heat gun, cut a new shield and began thermo-forming the bends. This is a fairly precise exercise in that it requires heating up the acrylic enough to bend, but not so much that it would sag, bubble or discolor. In an afternoon I had a nice new windshield – and in about 10 minutes of attempting to install it, I had two broken pieces of windshield. And this time, I must admit, I did feel somewhat deterred.

I did a third, and got this one installed all the way to the bolts secured with rubber washers and a lock nut. It cracked too. Even writing about it makes me tired and grouchy.

The new plan is polycarbonate: 30 times stronger than acrylic, and 3 times as expensive. I’m not screwing around this time. I’ve already downloaded the technical data sheets from the GE polycarbonate website (they make polycarbonate by the Lexan trade name). I am, however, at this time, in the midst of a windshield hiatus.

I really should have kept better track of what we’ve done to the thing, but I can give a pretty good run down nonetheless.  For the first couple months – Minnesota winter months – we didn’t really do anything.  When spring rolled around, we got busy hauling out debris and cleaning, but also being careful not to throw anything that could be useful away.  Here’s a general listing:

• Pulled out the rotted carpeting
• Removed the broken window pieces
• Removed and separated pieces of wood (counter tops, floor, paneling)
• Pullout the interior paneling; almost all of which was broken or rotted
• Swept out approximately two trash bags full of leaves, dirt and debris
• Wiped the whole boat down several times
• Removed rust from the inside of the hull

Getting the rust out of the interior of the hull was by far the most intensive, dirtiest and longest of the cleanup jobs.  I first swept, and then shoveled four 5 gallon buckets of flaky, stinky rust out of the bottom.  I vacuumed, then sanded, then again vacuumed and sanded the bottom free of rust.  It was so nasty that I didn’t even take any pictures, as the camera would have been ruined from the dust. 

After an extensive search on how to treat the bottom, I bought a product called POR-15 paint, and after wiping the bottom down with a special cleaner, applied the first coat.  The paint is made to chemically bond rusted metal and literally convert it into a solid metal again.  At $115 per gallon, I was looking forward to results, and wasn’t disappointed.  The stuff is really thin, and coats really well; when it dried, I had a hard, covered surface — it’s really pretty cool stuff, even though it isn’t eco-friendly. 

Once the boat was relatively clean, we were in a position to start doing actual renovations.  To be building was nice change of pace.  One of the first things we did was cut a new sub floor for both the interior cabin and rear exterior deck.  The deck would be exposed to moisture, so it needed to be treated.  I found some 3/8 inch plywood with a health/eco-friendly treatment that is arsenic and chromium free, and unlike normal treated lumber, the saw dust is not considered hazardous material.  Once we had a nice floor to walk on we went after other projects:

• Solidified the interior frame
• Braced the roof above the galley, which was sagging
• Re-glassed a crack in the front of the cabin roof
• Cut acrylic side windows
• Sanded off bubbled paint from the exterior fiberglass cabin
• Sanded, filled and painted the metal cabin door
• Painted the front sleeping cabin
• Framed in built-in shelves from boxes at the Reuse It Center
• Solidified the frame of the galley counter; secured a stainless steel top.
• Cut spaces for the drop-in stove and sink
• Place plastic sheeting on the cabin walls for moisture protection      

Besides those items, we had an eccentric junk-collecting friend of my dad make two small front cabin windows out of extruded metal framing and weld together the broken hand rail for the roof top.  He did it at a fraction of the cost of what a normal business would have charged for these small jobs, all from the comfort of his home shop.  

I got my first installment of scrap maple and birch cupboard material from a friend, and began framing in the interior cabin.  Peter is a carpenter, and his business regularly threw out various sizes of scrap material.  Making the interior out of this material would give it a “puzzle piece” effect, and probably wouldn’t look great, but will still look nice – especially for free.