Engine Commissioning--or Not

 

Today was a working day with lots of "two steps forward, one step back" action.  At least that's progress.  Our Universal 4-cyl engine (above) is in great shape, overall, but it needs some tune-up action.  Terry Mahoney and his guy, Jason, spent time on her but couldn't start her.  The had to pull the distributor and take it to their shop for some bench time.  Classic old-school tune-up action, the stuff I grew up on: points, condensers, plugs, timing, etc.  Funny engine design, like the old tractor engines, Terry said, i.e.,  no filters!  "Works fine," he says. Next week, when he has things back in order, he will also test the electrical connections of lights and the radio antenna on the mast.  With all that, we'll have the motoring option well in hand. 

Bob is making good progress stripping and re-varnishing the mast.  That looks great! And I figured out how to turn on the radio and the refrigerator.  More progress! I bought a fancy Sears battery charger, it trickle or fast-charges and turns off automatically, so the house batteries don't run down through the use of the bilge pump.  That is an area of good news, though.  The boat continues sealing up very well; the pump is only running about once every 90 minutes these days, excellent news! 

Rained like a sonuvagun this afternoon, so we gave up working on re-installing the deck hardware, the jib and genoa tracks.  We didn't remove those, and the nuts and bolts were not organized in the removal.  We've found pretty much everything, but it took most of the time we had today.  (Not much time, since it's a 140 mile round trip each time.)  We have things more organized and should make great progress the next time we go out, probably Sunday. Sunday, also, we'll lay out the sails and figure out what we have, re-pack them in their sail bags, and take them--with our new (old) dinghy--out to the boat.