Foreword: We’re still hanging out in
Fort Myers and still mostly lying low, trying to avoid the unmasked morons when
we do get out. As social unrest and outrage
gets layered on top of a pandemic, the pandemonium amplifies. And just when we thought federal & state
governments couldn’t possibly get any more abject & inept, they managed to
prove us wrong. It’s like someone
combined 1918 with 1968 and then put the inmates in charge of the asylum. But as we predicted back in March, that's what happens in leadership vacuums.
Regular Maintenance
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| The Main Engine's ZF Transmission with Dipstick and Fill Plug Removed, Ready to be Drained. |
First up was an oil and filter change
for the transmission on the main engine.
The book says that comes due at 1,000 hours of run time or annually,
whichever comes first. We were nowhere
close to the run time threshold, but it had been about a year, so it was
time. But thanks to the Reverso electric
oil change pump and the way Nordhavn plumbed that, this is a pretty
straightforward operation. You do have
to move a two-way valve on the main engine to direct the Reverso plumbing to
the tranny (rather than the engine’s oil sump), but after that it only takes a
few minutes to pump out the old oil.
While the ops manual for the ZF 280
transmission states oil capacity is 1.3 gallons we actually pumped out 1.5
gallons….that’s because on a continuous-duty diesel engine (in this case our
Lugger 6108) there is a transmission oil cooler tucked under the usual heat
exchanger and that additional plumbing requires additional oil capacity. Rick wasn’t sure when the transmission’s
filter screen was last removed for cleaning, so to be safe he purchased a new
one and installed that before refilling with new oil. The old one, however, looked almost pristine,
so it went into the spare parts bin.
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| New & Old Tranny Oil Screens on the Left; It Takes a Big Socket to Remove & Install. |
We use straight 40W Shell Rotella T-1
motor oil for the ZF tranny (30W is an option for cooler climates) to stay
compliant with manufacturer specifications.
While the Reverso system is capable of adding as well as extracting oil,
Rick prefers to add oil manually through the standard oil fill port using a
funnel….using the same Reverso hose that drains the unit might reintroduce used
oil contaminants, so why chance that?
Verifying that you’ve added enough new
oil back into the tranny isn’t exactly intuitive, however – the dipstick
markings are calibrated without regard for the additional oil capacity that the
oil cooler plumbing requires. Thus one
has to start the engine, pop the throttle handle briefly into forward and
reverse to circulate the oil, shut down, and then within 60 seconds or less
return to the engine room to check the oil level on the dipstick – before the oil cooler lines can drain
back into the tranny, and that level should be at the normal “full” mark. When checking the transmission oil level on a
cold engine that’s been sitting it should actually be above that full mark, and it’s wise to note that level on the dipstick.
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| The Transmission Oil Cooler (Yellow Arrow) and the Two Oil Cooler Hoses (Red Arrows). |
Shortly after the tranny oil change
trigger fired in our Wheelhouse software, so did the one for the wing engine –
same deal, an annual reminder. Any oil,
regardless of quality or composition, has a finite shelf life….inside an engine
(or an open container for that matter) the oil begins to lose its key
lubricating and protection properties at about the one year mark, regardless of
engine runtime hours. Theoretically, at
least, one could take an oil sample and have it lab tested for efficacy, and
extend that interval given positive test results. (And actually that’s a good idea at certain
intervals anyway, since such a lab test can detect chemicals and elements that
may portend internal wear issues.) The
problem, however, is you really don’t know for how much longer that oil with
retain its protective properties…unless you keep testing it. In the end, an oil and filter change is
cheaper, easier and more reliable. Why
risk equipment that (depending on which engine) costs between $25,000 and
$40,000 for the nominal costs of some oil and a filter?
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| Oil Change on the L984 Wing Engine; the Yellow Arrow Points to the Oil Filter. |
Once again the Reverso oil change pump
made this a fairly simple task….flip a couple of switches, pump the old oil
into a couple of empty containers, drop the old oil filter into a baggie, grab
a new filter and spin it on, then add 9.5 quarts of Delo 10W-40 into the Lugger
984. Done….all of that takes only 15
minutes. Then there’s another 15 minutes
for cleanup and disposal.
Project
Work
Next up was a small project that had
been on the “eventually” list for quite some time: to replace Ghost Rider’s anchor light with an LED
bulb. The reason is simple – in more
normal times Nordhavns tend to spend a lot of time at anchor running on battery
power only, and from sunset to sunrise the anchor light must be
illuminated. The LED bulb should last
longer, draw a lot less battery juice and theoretically also be brighter than the
standard incandescent bulb.
Unfortunately this project requires climbing on top of the radar arch
and balancing there with one hand while using the other for disassembling the
housing and swapping bulbs. The trick is
to buy a quality LED (we chose the “Dr. LED” brand on Defender), then pick a
calm day, bring a ladder to minimize pulled muscles, and then proceed slowly
and deliberately. Rick managed to pull it off without getting dizzy or falling.
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The anchor light on Ghost Rider (red circle) is approximately 22
feet above the waterline. Standing atop the radar
arch is not something
we want to attempt in a rolly anchorage.
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Another project on the “eventually” list
was getting to the less-optional stage, and that was to replace two duckbill
valves in a very tight space located behind the clothes dryer. These two duckbills are at the top of the
anti-siphon loops for the black water pump-out and guest toilet thru-hull
discharges, and these two were way overdue
for servicing; a failure of an anti-siphon valve could result in an influx of
seawater, perhaps even a backflow of effluent – either would be bad news. While we regularly serviced the five other
and easily accessible duckbill valves on the boat (master head, wing engine,
generator, etc.) these two required some creativity to access them.
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| Access Panel Removed...Revealing the Back Half of the Clothes Dryer that Prevents Any Kind of Access to the Well Hidden Anti-Siphon Valves. |
First, an access panel in the guest
stateroom had to be opened up, followed by removing nine anchoring screws for
the dryer (front & back sides), and then pulling the dryer out about 12
inches into the stairway space that connects the pilot house to the stateroom
level. That gave Rick enough room to angle
his shoulders through the small access panel and squeeze into the cramped space
behind the dryer; removing the old intake caps and duckbills and replacing with
new ones was the easy part. Reassembly
was mercifully undemanding. Generally
speaking the architects at Nordhavn are good at designing sturdy boats with
thoughtful maintenance access to most serviceable components….but not in this
case.
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| Unfastening & Pulling Out the Dryer into the Companionway. |
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| With The Dryer Pulled Out We Now Had Access to the Two Anti-Siphon Duckbill Valves (Yellow Arrows). |
Yet another project (actually decision)
coming due was what to do about an expiring EPIRB battery at the end of June. The “Emergency
Position Indicating Radio Beacon” is an indispensable piece of
safety equipment, particularly when out of VHF radio range. Capable of beaming SAR GPS distress signals
via satellite (along with a Guard channel homing beacon) for 48 hours of
continuous signaling, no blue water boater departs the dock without one. The thing works anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately the older EPIRB models utilize
batteries that expire after five years, at which time they require servicing by
an authorized dealer – the batts are technically not user replaceable.
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| Our Wet Locker is Pretty Packed with Safety Gear. Yellow Arrow Points to the New EPIRB, the Green Arrow to the Old One in the Ditch Bag. |
Given that the cost of that service is
about half what a new EPIRB costs, and that the latest models have ten year batts
which are user-replaceable, we opted to just purchase a new one, an ACR 2831
GlobalFix V4 model. We mounted this one
in the pilot house wet locker, where most of our safety equipment resides –
life raft, ditch bag, signaling devices, first aid kit, life vests, throw bag,
etc. – and still kept the old one in the ditch bag’s side pocket. Both are registered with NOAA as Ghost Rider-specific SARSAT
devices. (LINK.)
Periodically we also have to pay
attention to the ship’s navigation computer.
From a hardware perspective that’s a reliable device (a Silverstone 12
volt small form factor computer), but unfortunately its operating system is
Windows 10 Pro – the TZ Pro navigation software won’t run on anything else. And that is decidedly not a good OS for what
is essentially a 24-by-7 mission critical system. The Win10 OS likes to “phone home” rather
frequently for all sorts of software updates, and we’ve mastered rather
surreptitious techniques for bypassing that disruptive behavior while underway;
but occasionally when time allows – as when we are stuck in port – it’s a good
idea to backup that PC and then let it go through its update procedures…and
then test the hell out of it to be sure it didn’t break anything important.
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| The Ship's 12V Navigation PC is Tucked Under the Pilot House Console...Which is Fine Until You Need to Take it Apart to Swap Out Memory (RAM) DIMMs. |
So we allowed the OS upgrade itself to
the latest release (dated April 2020), which took a couple of hours across
several reboots, then regression tested, and thankfully most things looked good
afterwards. It did completely break the
non-essential “Stereo Mix” feature that we like to use for our MP3 music
library when at anchor or the dock (allows for concurrent use of hardwired and wireless
Bluetooth speakers); and it disabled the Open Shell software (we use it to
configure Win10 to look more like Win7); but at least all the important navigation
features and interfaces remained ops normal.
Rick eventually dug up an older Realtek audio driver that restored
Stereo Mix functionality, and then reinstalled the latest version of Open Shell
to regain our preferred look & feel of the start menu and desktop. Rick also took the down-time opportunity to
tear into the computer’s innards and upgrade its random access memory from 8GB
to 16GB, which should improve overall response time of the ship’s PC going
forward.
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| The Windows 10 System Info Reflects the Upgraded RAM and the New Version of the OS. |
Break/Fix
Opportunities
Of course no month of boat ownership
would be complete without some break/fix activity to drain the wallet and shame
the budget. We found two of those this
month.
The first was yet another air
conditioning system fault – rather suddenly we had no less than three air
handler units intermittently tossing “HI PS” (high pressure) errors, which
typically means low flow of raw water cooling to the compressors. The pathetic dribbles emitting from the
thru-hull seawater discharges confirmed that issue, but the question was why –
or more precisely, where in the plumbing was the blockage? Given the suddenness of the problem, and that
we had acid washed the A/C plumbing just four months ago, plus the fact that
the A/C strainer basket was clear of any obstruction, we were pretty sure the
clog was in or near the thru-hull inlet….under the hull.
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| The A/C Thru-Hull...After Closing the Valve (Red Arrow), Removing the Hose (Green Arrow), and Unscrewing the Elbow (Yellow Arrow), Rick then Reopened the Valve. Should Have Been a Geyser -- and Was Not. |
Rick closed that valve, removed the hose
and its 90 degree elbow, then slowly re-opened the thru-hull – what should have
been a three foot geyser of seawater into the lazarette was barely the
equivalent of a water bubbler. Something
was blocking flow on the bottom of the hull, and no amount of auguring with a
screwdriver was making any difference.
Nuts.
We placed a call to our diver service (LINK) and requested an
off-schedule visit, and a day later one of their divers arrived, dove under the
boat and dug out a handful of detritus from the protective grate on the
thru-hull intake: a few tiny fish, a small seaweed salad, some cellophane, and
a plastic bag. And that’s what restored
normal flow and A/C operations.
Lastly, we developed a surprise problem
with the boat’s crane….and a nasty one at that.
On one of our periodic walk-around inspections of the boat we discovered
a stream of hydraulic fluid leaking from the base of the crane, making quite a
mess on the boat deck. After removing
the inspection panels on the base the culprit was immediately obvious: the
hydraulic reservoir tank had rusted through in a fairly large area.
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| The Polished Stainless Crane/Davit Looks Good on the Outside.... |
For now that leaves us with no mechanism
for launching or retrieving the dinghy.
Rick has manually pumped out the remaining hydraulic oil (about two
gallons) to prevent more deck messes, and is researching equipment manuals and
potential service centers for help in figuring out next steps. The solution is not likely to be
straightforward or inexpensive. But
that’s a topic for a future post.
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| ....But Inside the Base its Hydraulic Reservoir Tank Has Rusted Through. |
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| But Ghost Rider Still Looks Good After a Thorough Shampoo and Rinse to Close Out June. |
