At the Headwaters

All the engine preparation, speculation, tinkering and procrastination cumulated with the introduction of one gallon of gasoline and my father and I each holding our own personal fire extinguishers.  On the first Sunday of Summer 2005 — two and a half years since we acquired the boat — we were finally going to try and start the sucker.  We probably could have tried months ago, but the combination of getting things (seemingly) in order along with pure feet dragging out of fear of the outcome brought us to the present time.

Oh, we still had more preparations to make, starting with running a hose from the old farm house, through the barn and into the engine — a couple hundred feet worth, plus homemade splices to boot — for water-cooling the engine.  Of course, the water was going to come back out of the engine, along with exhaust, so we hooked up a 2.5 inch metal hose to the exhaust pipe using metal tape, and then connected another 20 feet of landscape hose to the end of that to run out of the barn.

Rather than putting gas into the boat tank, we cut our nice, new fuel line (which had to be anyway for the addition of a fuel filter) and stuck the end into a portable gallon tank that I kept in my sort-of-working-fuel-gauged El Camino.  Dad tried to prime the engine with a little hand lever connected to the sediment bowl on the engine, but this did not work at all.  This was the first delay of the day, as, while getting fuel into the engine seemed to be a fairly important piece of the puzzle, it just wasn’t going.  Dad was hesitant to pour gas into the carburetor, but after a while, that’s about the only option we had.

While it felt as though there should have been a drum roll, it was without any fanfare that I turned the ignition.   The engine cranked, but nothing more.  After a few more tries we checked the electrical connections and found there was no charge getting to the coil.  After (minor) delay number two, I figured out that, for some reason, the coil and temperature sender wiring were switched.  This fix quickly lead to (substantial) delay number three, in which we tried to determine the firing order of the distributor and cylinders.

The manual for the engine nicely states the order of the cylinders:  1-3-4-2, but it says nothing about the order of connection to the distributor.  We figured the #1 was nearest to the engine, but it may also have been the one to the front of the engine — we just didn’t know.  We also didn’t know the direction it spun, but after reading the manual a bit further, learned that it was clock-wise.  After some good educated-guessing and lots of shoulder-shrugging, we came up with our order of things.

And then we were ready to roll, except now there was no voltage going to the spark plugs, even though there previously had been.  I think this may have been when I started having my doubts.  But we were already four hours into it, so we kept at it, dad adjusted the points, and we were back in the game.

I gave it a half a dozen cranks and we made a few more adjustments before there was a slight cough, a hiccup.  However slight it was, it was not to be mistaken, and I couldn’t help but crack a smile as thoughts of Frankenstein entered my mind.  I hit it again, and then engine began to start, but I got excited and let off the ignition too soon, and it sat inactive and flooded.  So we waited excitedly, and when we went back to it, the engine that had been sitting dormant for 14 years started with a roar, ran for a couple seconds and then went back to its usual state.  A few more tries and adjustments and we had the engine running in a manner that is my definition of success:  the smooth sounding engine didn’t stop until I turned it off with the key.

——————-

The next week when I went out and checked the oil, it was milky white.  There is a split in the seam of the water-cooled oil filter housing.  We should be able to weld it shut . . .

At this point, the main focus is on the electrical work of the boat. Much of the rest of it hinges on this, as we can’t close anything in or put the walls up until the internal wiring is complete. There are a couple problems with this, though; one being that the electrical work is a complete mess, the other being that I really don’t know anything about electricity and, what’s more, my head starts spinning anytime I try to learn about it. We got a good jump on it, though, when my brothers, Jamie and Adam, came down and traced all the wiring, labeled it and drew up the start of a wiring diagram.

I’ve got all the books: Boatowner’s Illustrated Handbook of Wiring, Powerboater’s Guide to Electrical Systems and a great one called the Boatowner’s Mechanical & Electrical Manual by Nigel Calder.  But apparently I have some sort of mental block when trying to understand theory and practice of DC electrical systems. Anyway, after staring at the wiring diagram for the engine and gauges and deciding that it didn’t match at all with what was in the boat, I meticulously replaced it all with new, correctly sized, wiring. 

So I’ve got it pretty much wired up, but there are still quite a few components, such as the ammeter, tachometer and other gauges that don’t have any markings on the terminals, so it is a bit of a toss-up as to how they are connected. 

Dad is quite good with electricity though, so we aren’t completely helpless.  We’ve got it now so the ignition key turns the engine over – progress!

I also spend a good evening writing out a wiring diagram for all the other electrical components, including the bilge pump, lights, blower, radio, horn, ect.  I listed out the amp draw of each as well, so I can match the circuits with the correct fuses.

                                                *****

I picked up a double-fluted horn and a spotlight from a residential boat yard in Grantsburg, WI, on the way to the family cabin.  The place is acres and acres of old boats, some nice, most in ruin, on this guy’s property:  shells of old boats, outboards and miscellaneous parts surround his mobile home. 

One of the first times we went there, we drove up as the owner was banging away at a frozen cylinder in the driveway.  I walked up and asked him if we could look around to see if there were any parts we could use.  He stared at me for fifteen seconds with a scowl on his face before I repeated my question.  To which he says, “What do you want,” and so I rephrase my question . . . and he proceeds to stare at the ground for a couple moments and then goes back to work hammering.  I look over my shoulder at my dad, and then look back at the guy and tentatively say, “Well . . . ?”   And he responds by mumbling something like “I don’t god damned care.”  Wow.

I stopped by a second time, and told him what I was looking for.  Same sort of exchange:  me asking fairly straight-forward questions and he staring at me like I ran off with his daughter.  The conversation ended by him telling me to stop by in two weeks and he’d have rounded up some parts. 

So I show up two weeks to the day, knock on his door, and he stares at me and asks me who I am and what parts I’m talking about.  After a while I give up and just pretend it was the first time I was there. 

We drove around in his old Ford truck on the back forty looking for cowl vents, a horn and spotlight.  I’d actually previously spotted the light I was after, but he said it was on a “good” boat – I’m pretty sure it had a hole in the hull — and it wasn’t for sale.  We found the other parts, but no other spotlights.  Amazingly, after a few minutes, he warmed up pretty good, and turned out to be able to hold a conversation.  To top it off, by the end, he decided it would be okay for me to have the spotlight I was after.  It took forever to get it off the boat, and for a bit it didn’t look like it was coming.  I wasn’t leaving with out it though, as he named the price of $40 for a stainless steel manually operated spotlight that isn’t made anymore – a good find. 

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.

The story of how I got the boat is interesting, but the story of the boat itself is intriguing.  I’ve had trouble tracking down documented information on it, so basically everything I know about the boat I learned from John.  Landau is a company that still exists and produces pontoons down in Missouri.  Representatives from the company say they’ve never made such a boat, and John swore it came from a company out of St. Paul that, in the 1960s, was specializing in steel-hull river boats.  Steel hull boats with built in axels, drop-down hydraulic wheels and welded on trailer hitches protruding out of the front, that is.  I didn’t fully believe it until I was driving down County Road 39 on the way to Lake Maria State Park when I serendipitously spotted one in ruin in the tall grasses of some guy’s field. 

If you look at the bottom of the hull, you see an ugly, but very solid weld line running the circumference of the boat.  The owners before John were welders, and had decided that the trailer-in-a-boat set-up was not a good one (for about 10 reasons that instantly come to mind), cut the bottom off, and welded on a new steel bottom.

John bought it in the mid-1980s, and did extensive river cruising in Midwest Rivers:  the Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota, St. Croix and Mississippi.  It was on the St. Croix at a marina when a couple drunks went through and smashed a bunch of boats – this one got a 2×4 straight through the cabin windshield. This was one of the reasons it was pulled out of the water and parked in John’s back yard.  When he had a heart attack, and then related health problems, the boat became low-priority and it sat in the back yard and steadily decreased in condition. One of my favorite truisms is that everything eventually comes full circle; in this case, the original problem – the windshield – has become my biggest nemesis of the whole project.  More on that later.   

We had it hauled on November 2002.  John wasn’t too keen on messing around with it in the winter, but it actually worked out quite well.  It had been a mild early winter, and there was no snow, but the ground was still frozen solid.  I hired Cross Country Boat Transport in Hastings, Minnesota by phone and told them exhaustively about the boat.  When the guy got there with his fancy hydraulic trailer system, though, he was completely grumpy.  He didn’t like the way the blocks were placed under the boat because it conflicted with getting the trailer under it.  He just sort of wandered around, smoked and swore under his breath for a while, until finally I told him that if he couldn’t do it, he should just take off, and I’d pay him for his mileage.  He decided to give it a shot, and it went a bit slow, but fine, and we were soon on the road.

The boat was hauled to my grandmother’s farm in Lake Elmo.  My friend Matt, sister Sarah and I had spent the previous weekend shoveling and sweeping 20 years worth of hay and dust in the top hay mow of the 100-plus year old barn.  The building was a Germanic earthen bank-barn, meaning it was built into the side of a bank of land. This allowed access to top storage floor by tractor, or originally horse and wagon, to bring in hay for winter storage.  It was also a pretty good place to store a 28ft boat for free.  Two huge sliding doors gave entrance to the loft, and it was simply a matter of opening them up, placing the blocks (correctly this time, of course), backing it in, and carefully resting it on the blocks.  It’s been there since 12/12/2002.

All culpability rests squarely on the shoulders of my father. Between road-trip vacations in the Bronco IV to Montana or to Florida in the CB-equipped RV, or some other such adventure, I remember my father regularly saying things like “Wouldn’t it be fun to ride motorcycle down to Panama” or “We should drive across Canada.”

The one that stuck in my head was “It would be great to take a boat down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.” He repeated that statement a couple years ago while peering down on Lock #1, located below the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. The proclamation rolled around in my head and commingled with ideas I had had about refinishing a houseboat using environmentally friendly building principles, for no other reason than to do it. It probably would have met the same fate as all the other half-baked daydreams I had, and have, but for some reason this time there was a sense of purpose. And at that moment, a plan was born.

I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have a boat. I didn’t really even know anything about boats, other than the fishing boats and canoes I grew up around in Northwestern Wisconsin. So it was a haphazard effort to locate a boat with limited, but very specific set of criteria: a) it had to have the capacity to live aboard b) it had to cost very little to acquire and c) it had to float. Our most promising candidate was a houseboat out of Iowa, which was listed in the want-ads as a nice 26 ft aluminum hull ’79 Mastercraft that was listed for the bargain price of $1500. It had been swamped in a storm, sunk in shallow water, and then hauled out. My main concern wasn’t really its ability to fulfill criterion “c”, but more about the water damage and mold problems. So we passed.

Figuring that what I was looking for might not be best found in the typical classifieds, I went on the offensive. One evening I logged on to www.twincitiesfreemarket.org, a unique reusable item trading site, and placed a wanted item posting among the desperate pleas for children’s clothing and washing machines:

Do you have an old houseboat that needs some work that you want to get rid of? Let me help you out! I’m looking for an old houseboat that needs renovations that I can restore and float down the Mississippi River. Please call or email.

It was less than a week before Dave emailed me and said he didn’t have such a boat, but he did know someone who did. Technically, Dave said, another guy had given him this project boat, but since he was restoring a sail boat, he didn’t have the time, money or energy for this one. So perhaps I could have it, Dave hinted, but there was to be a drug deal-type get-to-know-you session first, to make sure I was the real deal before I was allowed access to the man with the goods. So Dave and I had a couple odd driveway meetings, in which we talked about boats, Minneapolis neighborhoods and the weather. Finally, Dave set up a meeting, which he would also be present at, for me to meet John and see the boat.

We met in John’s Southwest Minneapolis yard on a gray day in October. He was a slow moving old fella with a penchant for storytelling. His stories were told in a deliberate, accented speech that was punctuated by ending his sentences with the listener’s name: “This is a fine boat that has seen quite its share, and it shows, Peter.” (I recently realized, while listening to Nixon’s White House tapes that he sounded eerily similar to the voice on the tapes belonging to Henry Kissinger. John is from Spain; Kissinger from Germany, so I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s haunting). The boat was jacked up on blocks and wrapped in a mass of gray vinyl tarps, as it had been for the last several years.

With much caution and even more liability disclaimers, John informed me how to gain entrance to the boat. I climbed up, slid under the tarp and gently hopped on to the rear deck of the craft. It was dark, and I had no idea what to look for anyway, so I basically walked through and focused on not allowing any sharp, rusty objects to gain entrance into the bottoms of my feet. I stood for a moment inside the calm, dim cabin, which was strewn with wires, rotted wood and miscellaneous boat pieces and it gave me the feeling of being in a newly-found archeological ruins. This was it.

I popped my head out from under the tarp, and my huge grin was met with John’s huge, knowing smile. We went inside, and after much more storytelling, I wrote him a check for $50 for the title to the boat, and, just like that, I was the owner of a 28 foot, steel, modified V-hull 1961 Landau Land and Water cabin cruiser with a Volvo-Penta Aquamatic 80 I/0 engine.