Back Afloat

Sunday, April 21, 2019

The Lucky Nickel has finally been released from the boat hospital in Uxbridge. It was a long, expensive process. Just like with a terrestrial home renovation, once you get started the list of work to do and the amount of money you spend increases steadily until you reach a point where something that previously would have felt like a large expense passes by with barely a flicker of recognition. The phrase “while you’re at it…” is a particularly fraught one.

However, before we get into the nitty-gritty of what went down, I feel I should provide my less boaty readers with a few definitions of terminology that will help everyone get the full effect.

Bow: The pointy bit at the front

Stern: The back end where the engine, propellor and rudder are.

Swim or Swim Deck: The part of the stern that sticks out over the propellor.

Propellor: I’m sure I don’t need to define this, but did you know that propellors come in right-handed and left-handed versions? Remember that bit of trivia for later.

Counter: The floor of the swim deck

Rudder: The flat vertical blade of steel that sits underwater behind the propellor and allows you to steer the boat by pivoting it back and forth.

Skeg: The bar that extends from the bottom of the stern to stabilise the rudder and give it something to pivot on.

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A photo illustrating how the swim deck juts out over the propellor and rudder, which is supported by the skeg.

Gas lockers: The compartments in the back corners of the swim deck that contain the large propane cylinders (gas bottles) supplying the hot water heater and stove.

Weed hatch: A tall square sleeve with a lid, located on the swim deck and positioned directly above the propellor and extending up above the waterline. Opening the weed hatch allows one to reach a hand in to clear vegetation or other muck that might be fouling the propellor. Obviously, this is best done with the engine off.

Freeboard: The amount of boat that sits above the waterline. Having too little freeboard is inviting disaster.

Base plate: The flat bottom of the boat

Overplate: To add a new layer of steel plate to an area to strengthen it

Gearbox: An enclosed collection of gears connecting the output of the motor with the shaft and propellor. The gearbox is designed to decrease the turning speed, thereby increasing the torque - the twisting force applied to the propellor.

Stern Tube: The steel tube the pierces the hull and allows the propellor outside the boat to be connected to the engine’s gearbox inside the boat. It’s actually a two layers of tubing that sleeve inside each other with increasingly fine tolerances, supported by a big bearing.

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The old propellor shaft extending through the stern bearing and stern tube

Ok, definitions done! Now back to our regularly schedule bog post:

I knew going in that it was very likely I’d need to do more than just have the new skin tank installed. Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will recall the alarming amount of rust and scale that I discovered under the floor of the cabin during the last round of renovations. With the boat scheduled to be out of the water anyway, I decided it was a perfect time to have the hull properly inspected by a marine surveyor, and braced myself for bad news about the amount of sound steel left between most of my worldly possessions and the briny deep. (It’s really more like "slimy shallows", but allow me a bit of poetic license.)

So it was that a lovely man named Vladimir came to give the Lucky Nickel a thorough going over as it sat beached in a dirty shed. Vladimir spent a full day examining the hull with a couple fancy ultra-sound devices. For those keeping score they were a UM-1D, 5 MHz, 10 mm ultrasonic gauge with twin crystal probe, which had echo-echo and single echo functions, and a Tritex 5600 2.25 MHz, 13 mm multigauge, with single crystal soft face probe for multi-echo mode. Also he hit the boat with a hammer.

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As he went along, he marked the hull with mysterious chalk symbols and numbers which are apparently highly meaningful.

At the end of the survey Vlad walked me through everything he found, and the list was not short. Surprisingly, the one thing that did not raise alarm was the thickness of steel in the base plate. It seems that it’s already been overplated with 6mm steel at some point in the past, so my fears about water geysering up into the cabin of the boat were unfounded. Yay! But of course there were other areas of concern, which is unsurprising in a steel-hulled boat fast approaching its 50th birthday.

I was so relieved about the baseplate that at first I wasn’t phased by Vlad’s long list, which went like this:

1. Overplate the bow halfway up on both sides
2. Overplate the entire counter on both sides
3. Straighten the bent skeg and reweld where needed
4. Line the gas lockers with extra steel plate
5. Make the weed hatch taller to allow for more freeboard
6. Replace the stern tube and stern bearing, and repack the stern gland
7. Wash the hull and apply fresh paint

And don’t forget there was still the new skin tank to do, and the re-plumbing of the cooling system, which was the whole point of the exercise. Once I got the cost estimate for all this work I had to sit down and catch my breath; it was more than double what I’d anticipated. I’ll admit a small voice in my head said, “Walk away. Just leave the keys and walk away…” But of course I didn’t do that. Other than the moment of madness when I bought a geriatric narrowboat and starting pouring money into it, I’m actually a very practical and sensible person. (Oh, and there was that quit-job-sell-house-travel-the-world thing too I guess…) Regardless, in the years since the “Lucky Nickel” became part of my life, I’ve wisely squirrelled away a pretty hefty chunk of money that I labelled the Boat Emergency Fund. This was alongside another chunk labelled Boat Renovation Money. Together, those two pots of cash were mostly enough to cover all the work.

Also I reasoned that everyone everywhere has to pay for where they live in some way. Most people pay rent or a mortgage every month. Even people who own their homes outright still have to buy new roofs or repair foundations or re-do the siding. As a boat-dweller, I cruise for long stretches with no meaningful outlay at all and then occasionally have to vomit up masses of money all at once. There really are no free rides, especially not in London. And even if I’d walked away, I’d have had to find somewhere to rent, and it wouldn’t take many months of that before I’d spend as much in rent as I was contemplating spending on repairs, with nothing to show for it. At least the freshly-repaired boat is an asset that has some resale value. So I swallowed hard and gave the boatyard a wheelbarrow full of fifty pound notes and waited for them to get on with it.

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And waited. And waited. And waited. This is the shed where the boat sat while the yard tried to find time to do the much much larger list of work that needed doing.

That’s why things took a lot longer than expected. First, the list exploded. And second, the boatyard  had only planned to spend a week welding the new skin tank and slapping on a fresh coat of paint. Instead, they were stuck with the nautical equivalent of the Six Million Dollar Man. ("Lucky Nickel. Narrowboat. A vessel barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild her. We have the technology…”) So all I could do was keep extending my stay in the Uxbridge garden shed, or in generous friends’ spare rooms, and wait for the work to be complete.

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This is the new skin tank under construction. You can see the holes in the hull where the water will enter and exit. Plus it’s wafer thin! Unlike my old, fat, crappy skin tanks. The chalk marks show where they put internal baffles that force the water to take a long and chilling path through the tank, so I have pretty high hopes that engine overheating is a thing of the past.

The overplating was pretty standard and boring, but the new stern tube was an interesting process. First a welder had to chop out all the old fittings, including the entire plate the old bearing was bolted to. I’m guessing he tried to unbolt the bearing and got frustrated with the gunked up rusty old hardware and just took a torch to the whole thing. I don’t blame him. The boat often makes me feel that way too.

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Here’s the new propellor shaft. Oh, and the new propellor.

AGSWPLRs should now be saying to themselves, "Wait, did she say new propellor? That wasn’t on the list!” And they’d be correct, because they’re astute like that. It turns out that when the mechanic came to install and align the new shaft he noticed that the gearbox had been connected to run in reverse. He surmised that the original engine for the boat was what they call left-handed, and therefore the propellor was also left-handed - designed to spin in a certain direction. Somewhere in the boat’s past the engine was replaced with a right-handed model. And rather than getting a corresponding right-handed propellor, the installer simply reversed the controls to the gearbox, so that when you pushed the throttle forward the gearbox ran backwards and the propellor shaft turned in the correct direction for the propellor. (Yeah it made my head hurt a bit too.)

So I’ve been running all this time with the gearbox going backwards. The Boat Engineering and Maintenance Division in South Africa claim that the gearbox can run happily in either direction. Mechanically there’s no difference. But I got a new propellor anyway because, as I mentioned earlier, this was at a point where an extra £330 seemed like a drop in the bucket/canal.

Then, finally, Lucky Nickel was lowered back into the water and I got to fire up the engine and point myself back down the canal. And drumroll… the engine temperature stayed steady the whole time! And I’m pretty sure the new propellor and newly re-oriented gearbox gave me more oomph than I used to have. The weather wasn’t ideal - for instance, I could have done without the hail - but I still enjoyed being back on the canal. And as the hours went by I could feel some of that too-familiar engine anxiety slipping away, and it was a great relief. I’m sure some other issue will crop up soon enough. But for now, for today, I’m taking the win.

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Back at the tiller at last, with the boatyard fading in the background.

2 Comments:

daphne said...

Yeah, bravo - I feel like champagne is appropriate. Having the (engine) anxiety feeling, fade away must make Pam a new person. Enjoy!

Kathryn said...

Yippee! So glad you and the Lucky Nickel made it out the other end!

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