Making some progress...

Now that the garage is finally in order, and with the Easter holidays not all that many weeks away, I thought it prudent to go and fetch the boat that I'd bought from John Horman all those months ago, with which I'd done nothing due to it being in stored at the amazingly chilled Bob and Bette's back yard on the Gold Coast. To date, no one including John have seen the boat actually work. So with apologies to the grass at the front of our house, I nudged it in there for what I hope is a relatively short time.



After first clearing away all the leaves, errant bags of bolts, and oversize washers I was able to have a better look. The first thing to do was to swap the burnt out motor from the lift and trim mechanism and rewire the limit switch. On the little boat that we already had, the motor has to be readied for transport after a voyage by pulling it out of the water (from within the boat) before you actually hoist the boat onto the trailer. The motor doesn't actually get taken off, it is simply rotated around a fulcrum. It's a fairly heavy lump of metal so even though it's only a 35hp you know its not made of feathers shall we say. On the new boat, the motor is 140hp and physically much larger. You have to push pretty hard to get it to lift manually, even from the outside with it disconnected from lifting arms. So you need to have a lift and trim mechanism, which is a combination of 3 hydraulic rams, to initially move its orientation to the boat whilst its actually pushing it (the Trim) or to lift it up away from the ground (the Lift). It was a bit trickier to do that I'd expected, but eventually, Phoebe was able to operate it using the trim and lift button on the still unmounted throttle arm.





There's a fair bit of work to do on the boat to make it right, but the fundamental things like the strength of the hull seem to be good. We felt that the important thing to do is to get all the functions functioning and try it out as is, before going to any effort to do it up. The control systems are all over the shop, and the priming bulb and some of the fuel line was corroded to a point where it was leaking, and inflexible respectively. I made a last minute dash to BCF to get a replacement bulb and then once that was fitted, cleaned the plugs, and had a try at starting it up. It turned OK but nothing fired. I took off the water cover from the mouths of the 4 carburettor intakes, found a fuel tap hidden behind it and manually primed the motor after cracking the butterflies slightly open. When I turned this time it sounded like it was going to fire - so I fitted it with ear muffs and fired it up. (The ear muffs are rubber cups that fit over the inlet / outlet for the engine cooling system. It sucks water from whatever the boat is bobbing about in, be it salt or fresh water and circulates it. Out of the water, you have to put the water there manually with the muffs - supplied with a garden hose). The motor had been readied for storage by John, who had filled the cylinders with oil. When the engine fired up, there was a massive plume of white smoke coming out of the exhaust (which exits from the centre of the propeller) as this was burned out, and oil was spattered over the grass. (Sorry grass) The fantastic thing was that the engine sounded like a very large two stroke motorcycle reving. The response was very quick and very encouraging. I can't wait!!!