Always something
Getting the boat ready for a passage is seldom just preparing the boat and stowing things away, many obstacles and unexpected events seem to sum up as you're preparing to cast off for a longer journey. Alex was supposed to replace the impeller for the salt water pump, and in the process of removing the cover to access the impeller, the head of one of the old bronze bolts broke, and left the body inside the thread. As he had no access with the drill to remove it there are then, next mission was to remove the pump completely and begin the job of removing the screw. Above he's using a power drill, and a hoover to collect the small metal bits.
Here it is.
While the cover for the pump was removed, Alex also discovered that three vanes of the impeller were missing, thus he had to dismount the salt water cooling system to trace the missing bits so they wouldn't clog up the heat exchanger. A third surprise appeared when dismounting the system, which was that the exhaust elbow was corroded and a big chunk of it fell off when removed. In lack of a spare elbow and no real time to wait for a delivery from the US, he has now filled the missing part with a metal filler and he'll shape it to original shape when the filler is cured.
Old impeller vanes were found, new impeller is in place, remains only to remount the water pump (luckily we had a spare gasket onboard) and this old engine (Perkins 4108) is hopefully in working condition again. Definitely need to fetch a new exhaust elbow as soon as we get to Ft Lauderdale.
