It hasn’t rained in a few days so Jason and I went ahead and squeezed some sealant into the chainplates.  Jason cleaned the old sealant out weeks ago and they’ve just been sitting out in the open under a tarp.

We’ve also been chasing the electrical system trying to figure out what’s been modified over the years and, mostly, why.  While wiring up the alternator controller, Jason found a lot of wires that had been modified, so we crawled into the lazarette and did a few hours of troubleshooting on the gageboard.  We jumpered some wires together and figured out what the line of relays did, how the ignition works, etc.  In the end though, everything is actually hooked up in a functional manner, the bow thruster works, and the only thing left to figure out is the coolant and oil pressure gauges.

I ended cutting off almost all of the zip ties holding these wires up.  It’s going to take a while to put it all back.

I also finished up a few small things like hooking up the bidet plumbing at the forward head.

Since I’ve been messing around with the engine trying to get it ready to go, I found some more things that need fixed. This time it was the freshwater coolant pipe at the front. There’s a drain plug in the pipe that is supposed to be a drain point for the coolant, but it was rusted in place.  Somehow Jason managed to get the plug out so we tapped the threads and I painted it because it was rusty as hell and looked awful. 😉

While I had more of the accessories and plumbing off the front of the engine I noticed that the paint job I did originally wasn’t quite as nice once the stuff was removed.  It was hard to clean and hard to paint with everything in place.  As usual I started poking around and once the first piece of paint flaked off, the wire toothbrush came out and I went to town removing paint and the areas of crusty corrosion that I missed before.

So… no one but me will notice, but I finally ran out of color matched Yanmar gray.  I bought some gray hammertone Rustoleum a while ago because I knew it would be a close match.  I haven’t used it on anything next to the Yanmar paint until now.   Turns out that the Yanmar is a slightly warmer tone of gray and more sparkly, but the colors are very close.  I should have just used the Rustoleum and been done with it!

The spray paint ran us out of the boat for the day, so we left and went to the pool instead! The weather was PERFECT today! Warm, sunny, and not humid!

After lounging in the water for a while, Jason got a phone call from Dan who is fabricating the arch for the back of our boat.  It was mocked up in the shop and he wanted us to swing by and make sure we liked it! YAY!!!!

It looks way better in person and it also looks HUGE in person!  I’m super happy with how it’s turning out and it should look amazing on the back of the boat.   We may be doing a test fit on wednesday or thursday! 🙂