Pat's Progress
Well, we all felt that not much had been achieved, but on reflection at the end of play, our progress was quite satisfactory.
There are now two coats of deck paint on all the boat gunnel surfaces. The preparation for this was woven around the assembly of the two remaining spud leg mechanisms. The port side went together well, however, problems with the starboard side, referenced in our last blog, took a bit of dealing with.
Now, we had not imagined that the mighty mag' drill would be out again. But investigations revealed that there was a twist in the pivot point at the bottom of one of the uprights. There was no simple solution to this, other than re-drill to create a hole that a pin would insert in to. The movement of the joint is very small, so should present no operational problems. At least all the joints run free and above all, happy!
All the hoses are now in place for the hydraulic rams, so, apart from the main jib cylinder, which we will replace on Wednesday, the system is at a point where the hydraulics can be re-filled and powered up for testing.
The rudder has made great progress. Our cunning plan to trepan the bottom bearing with a 44mm cutter worked like a dream. The pitted crusty surface was rejuvenated and will soon rest in the new machined bush that the workshop kindly turned up for us and fitted last thing today.
Elsewhere, some more paint was applied in the control cabin, below the front window. Two more bilge pumps have been plumbed in and electrically connected, ready for testing soon. We require some 28 large washers to sit between the split pins and the spud leg metalwork. All the ones we had recovered were gathered together, carefully cleaned and then painted. These too can be refitted on Wednesday.
So, as you see, quite a lot was achieved and we headed off content with our days effort.
