Good to go! SSN Sea trial!

As the final touches are completed on SSN the eagles soar overhead and the seagulls swoop and dive bomb trying to protect their young.

The eagles are in for a feeding. Granville Island's very own Steve Irwin, aka Kevin Adie who run's a salmon charter company feeds all the animals. Seals follow his fish boats in hoping they caught some fish and the guts will go their way. The eagles come in every night around 4 and Kevin is ready with chicken legs.

Four months later, the old gal is ready to go! Well, the new old gal is ready to go!

The engines have new caps, plugs, leads and coils. They have been timed and tuned. New ignition kits installed and new connections to the batteries and the charger have been run. New master battery switches installed and all new 120V wiring from the shore power connector to a new panel and to all appliances.

These are the compression numbers for the starboard engine are all good. It had been grumpy all week as Dr D worked to diagnose why is was running rough. Double checked the firing order, checked the compression, installed new coil, new electronic ignition kit, new plugs, new wires and timing. Still rough sounding with major swings in the advance numbers? Set it and restart the engine and it was way off?

The newly installed electronic ignition kit was a dud. The hours spent looking elsewhere for the problem were frustrating. Doug switched in the old points system underway and the engine ran beautifully.

All the engine mounts have bee removed, re-bedded with epoxy under the wood blocks, aluminum strips added and bolted down. Some mounts had to be replaced, all were made operational. Alignment is now possible whereas before the mounts were all frozen solid with rust unable to be adjusted at all.

A new bilge pump has been installed on an automatic switch as a back-up to the main pump that was found hidden under the old hot water tank, inaccessible to service.

When it comes to wiring it would be difficult to find someone better then Dr D. He does everything with great pride and skill. Where once was a rats nest of wires, some live laying loose in the bilge, Dr D has run new marine grade wires, replaced the old non-ignition protected battery charger with a new gasoline friendly made for this job unit.

A sub-station of fuses protecting all of the equipment in the engine compartment. Having a secondary supply station aft makes running new wires much easier. If you had to run all of this to the new main panel in the galley it would be a lot of extra hours and a lot of extra wire.

A very slick job! The level of difficulty - sorting out what was what, what went where and when, and then running new, eliminating old and making such a neat job of it shows the level of craftsmanship Doug brings to his work. No half measures, no cutting corners with meticulous attention to detail.