Well its been a while since I have put anything into my blog on Susan. I have taken my annual summer vacation at Christmas time (here in the southern hemisphere it summer over Christmas/New Year). Interestingly enough I saw one of the other bloggers on this ISP in the Royal Cape Yacht Club yesterday in the Spirit of Mystery. Nice to actually see somebody after reading their blog for some time.
As for Susan, I havent had much time available to work on her recently but did manage two days over the past weekend and have started to make some progress. The difficulty I have had with my propshaft may link back to a change which had been made previously to replace the rubber dounut in the drive train with a solid engineering nylon block machined out to fit. The problem with this is that their is no flexibility in the drave train whatsoever which lead to the snapping of the shearpin. Well I guess you could call it a shearpin but in reality it is more like a thin narrow bolt. Certainly not up to managing to attach a 50HP diesel engine to a propellor. We after taking some advice I have decided to chop out the old nylon block and replace it with the proper unit. It was a mission to chop out the old nylon block as soem of the bolt heads had been damaged by the previous owner and I ended up grinding out two of the six bolts. I now have the unit out and plan to visit the suppliers and see what I can replace it with. Other than that I am getting some canvas work done to improve the boats appearance and am also busy with some bilge pump maintenance.