Kaimusailing

The work on the Atomic 4 continued, but I was unsuccessful in getting the engine to turn. The 10 ton hydraulic ram from Lowes.com resisted all my efforts to get it to work properly. I bled it several times and concluded after over a week of attempts, that its check valve was not working properly. A call to customer service gave me the opportunity to bring the 66 pound apparatus to the local Lowes store. I wanted to find out if I was doing something wrong or if the ram was defective.
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Apparently Lowes does not sell many hydraulic rams. When I brought the heavy box in on a roll around flatbed, the customer service person called for someone from the tool department to come over and evaluate the unit. The tool guy said he had never used a hydraulic ram and didn't know much about it. I showed him how it was malfunctioning by hooking up the expander claw to the pump and demonstrating how the claw would open and close with each stroke of the pump. It's supposed to hold open and then open further on the next pump stroke. He agreed that it was probably defective and I was able to return it and get my money back.
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Next I stopped at Harbor Freight which has a bunch of hydraulic tools including jacks and rams. They wanted $260 for their cheaper 10 ton ram, about another hundred more for their more expensive 10 ton ram. Lowes' $120 seems awfully low in comparison, but the unit didn't work, so I looked around. HF had a 4 ton ram for only $180. I checked Lowes.com and the 4 ton ram was about $120. I put in an order for one, but then canceled it when I found I could get it directly from the manufacturer for only $88. That's more like it.
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All my hydraulic ram pumping left me with two sore shoulders and difficulty sleeping. I have a week to rest up until the new ram comes in.
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When I checked my order for shipping, I was chagrined to see they had messed up the shipping address. The street and number were correct, but then they added an additional street and number, the street and number for the boatyard in Georgia. How odd. I know if you Google the boatyard's street address it comes up right away with Saint Marys Boat Services, etc., could be confusing to a delivery driver if he should do so. Maybe the new hydraulic ram would be rerouted.
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I found that the seller, Vevor, gets address information from PayPal, if you are using that service to pay. There are some other quirks in their system. I was able to correct the address in my account information, but the ram had already shipped with the double street address on it.
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I tried to contact UPS, the carrier, to correct the address, but when I tried to login it denied me, said I was using an invalid username or password, even though I was using the username and password that had been saved on the phone, or maybe a previous phone.
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When I then tried to correct the address as "guest" they sent me a verification code, and when I entered that in the little boxes, instead of numbers appearing, strange characters appeared, not things like pound sign, etc., more like gibberish. Of course that would prompt an incorrect verification code message, try again. After 3 tries I was locked out.
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The next day I called the nearest UPS store and they gave me a number to call the hub, "where all the brown trucks are". The girl at the hub couldn't help me because the package was in transit. She gave me another number to call. I called that number and had trouble understanding the person on the other end of the line. I'm hard of hearing, I said, partly true, but this person was very inarticulate.
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We finally got the address correction completed and now when I check the tracking number it says, delivery delayed. Oh boy.
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I watched a video on YouTube of a Catalina 30. There must be a million videos of this boat, and now YouTube is prompting me with a zillion of them as suggestions. Some of them are "walk throughs" of people trying to sell a boat, others are attempts to tap into the YouTube revenue stream. Some are interesting, most have some sort of click bait, like a bikini clad lady sailor, but the body, ahem, of the video is some guy, unshaven, ball cap on backwards, unrehearsed faulting narration, and if by some chance it is a video I like, I will find that the last video they uploaded was about 6 years ago. What happened to them? Is the Catalina 30 a killer boat and all we see are sailors videoing to their doom?
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If I want videos about repairing the Atomic 4, I end up with Moyer Marine, who antiseptically service the engine in a shop on a bench, clean, lab like, micrometers at the ready, no oil or grease in sight. Surprised the mechanic is not wearing a tie or lab coat. The older Catalina 30's have the Atomic 4. They generally get replaced by a diesel. The Universal M25 diesel is the direct replacement for the Atomic 4 and I have one down in the boatyard in Georgia. Unfortunately the boat is up here in Maryland, never the twain to meet, probably.
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I get a lot of inspiration from 2Vintage, a YouTube channel by a fellow named Joe Weber. He diagnoses and repairs various small engines, like dirt bikes, ATV's, outboard motors, and motorcycles. His set routine is very effective and a good routine to follow in diagnosing an unknown motor. First turn it on, if the battery is dead apply a booster charger, see what the electrical system is doing, look at lights, brake lights, signal lights, transmission gear indicators, and if it is new enough it will have a lot of data to display, mileage, maybe engine fault codes. Then he usually checks oil level, coolant level, checks the oil for contamination and metal bits, pulls spark plus and checks for spark, puts a compression tester into the plug holes to check for compression, oils the cylinder if it has been sitting a long time. Often the compression before and after oiling the cylinders will show that the piston rings are stuck. If he has spark and compression he routinely removes the carburetors and goes through them, checking if the floats have gasoline in them, they should not, check the float valve and valve seat, pull the jets and check them for blockage, and if the carb is really filthy, submerge them in an ultrasonic cleaner. They usually come out looking like new. He checks gas tank for rust and bad gas, petcock for proper operation, and puts fuel filters inline in the lines to the carburetor. In fuel injected engines he pulls the injectors and checks for proper fuel flow and an injector that is spraying a fuel mist, not a stream of fuel. Using his routine can get an engine running in 2 hours or so, when another mechanical shop or dealership has spent much more time and given up.
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And so I have confidence I can get the Atomic 4 running again. Should I live so long. The new hydraulic ram is due in, if it gets here, on a day when I will be at the doctors.
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People say I shouldn't have a gasoline engine inboard on a boat, yet they often have propane stoves and propane is more dangerous than gasoline. Propane can leak, but it doesn't dissipate, it is heavier than air and seeks the lowest level, accumulates, and when you have a spark, like a bilge pump starting off, kaboom. Diesel is less combustible but has a smell as well as gasoline having its own smell. We take it for granted. Much nicer to have an electric motor, some high capacity batteries, and solar panels.
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One such Catalina 30, and I am sure there are a lot more, documented his conversion to electric power on YouTube. You have a sailboat, not a power boat, you like wind and sails, not gasoline, diesel, and fumes, oily greasy mess. Nice to have quiet electric propulsion, free electricity from the sun. Unfortunately electricity and salt water don't cooperate together very well.
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You could just sail without a motor. If you go back about 150 years they did not have power on their sailing yachts. At some point you could hire a tug, maybe a steam tug. Before that you had to wait for a favorable wind to move in the direction you wanted to go. I guess sailing was more serious back then because that is how things got shipped across oceans and even up and down the coast. A skipper really earned his keep back then. It's a different mindset. We want to now go where we want to go when we want to go. We can't wait.
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I went to Pocomoke to a health clinic visit. The VA gave me a blood pressure monitor. I purchase a fluid transfer pump and magnet on a stick from Harbor Freight. I will transfer the crankcase oil out of the Atomic 4 if I can get it to turn over. I also purchased ingredients for chicken cacciatorre. The chicken will come from Food Lion at 69 cents a pound.
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I filled the non-pressure cooker with 4 chicken leg quarters and a chopped up onion and green pepper. A box of mushrooms got chopped on top. All this was sitting on a vegetable steamer on the bottom of the cooker. I dusted the top with Italian spice mix plus additional dry basil. I added about 2 tbsp of minced garlic, like a half dozen cloves. A half pint of water steamed up, I covered, let it cook for an hour. I tasted. Let it cook for another hour.
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The end result was like a cannibal's stew pot, bones separate from skin and meat, tomato based sauce bubbling away, reduced, thick and tasty. I enjoyed a dinner of chicken cacciatorre, rustic style. I put away 3 portions in the fridge, generous portions.
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The next day I decided to try the 4 ton ram on the stuck engine. I demonstrated how it worked to my dockmate, Wes. It looked much better functionally than the previous 10 ton ram that I returned to Lowe's. When I pumped it up on the engine, straining against 6 strands of dynema, rated at 1600lbs breaking strength each, there was a loud pop. The dynema had snapped. I had done this before years ago with a previous 4 ton ram. I just added more strands of dynema at that time and the ram did the job.
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This time I decided to bear directly on a piece of angle bar bolted to two of the cylinder head studs. I must have reached a new level of pressure with the ram, there was a loud CRACK that sounded like a gun going off. One of the studs had fractured and gone to who knows where. The 10 ton ram would have had this same disastrous effect, if it had worked properly. This now meant I had to find another way to free the engine.
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The image was taken at the Legion. Another remarkable sunset there.