keltik

Next weekend once the paint has hardened, I'll flip the hull over, make some small modifications and paint the inside. Hoping to put a proper firewall in and add a frame around the engine cover opening so it can bear weight, be walked on and get sealed better to keep the waves out.

Welded on the new bits using the small amount of welding skills I possess. Grinder n paint. Found a couple more surprise pinholes that got welded up. Then I decided to paint the hull again using a proper primer this time. None of this work is stuff I'm supremely proud of, but it's good enough.

Stripped off the gobs of bathroom sealant and carried out a thorough inspection of the hull. There were multiple pinholes and paper thin steel. Ended up cutting a modest amount of crap from the starboard side but took a massive amount of crusty garbage out of the port side. Mr Greer sent me some lovely 2.5mm plate to craft my patches from. I dont have a brake or anything like the right kind of tools for bending - so the patches were formed using a hammer, a vice and vast amounts of aggression.

VVTI delete and add lumpy idle to your repertoire of surprise. Bottom end is where the peasants live, just keep the tacho needle where eagles dare

On the bright side, it might result in more posts in this thread - and I'm OK with that.

A few minutes with the strip disc and flap wheel turned this... Into this: Amusingly that's not even the side that was leaking. This one is. You can see the peeled off 'patch' and the offending hole that let all of the river go for a spin through the bilge pump. Today's mission is to head down to the metal recyclers and obtain some replacement metal to hot glue in there.

Well it's been 2 months of ignoring this thing in the shed and what do you know....it still isn't fixed. 3 trips as passenger in other people's boats has motivated me a little tho. So it's time to flip the hull. I pushed it off the trailer and naively thought I could just roll it over using muscle power with the misses holding my hernia in. Turns out steel is heavy. That's no way my shed could support a chainfall so I got out the trolley jack and a series of wooden props.

Missus has one of these so can happily look at bits you might need to figure out. They do run a heat exchanger in the exhaust after the cat

Have had to replace a Qashqai pedal and a Pulsar pedal recently. Was pretty rare that we ever had to do a VE pedal - just lots of the v6 throttle bodies. Anything GM/LS makes life easy

The noise was hilarious, 2 stroke lawnmower followed by a car bonnet being dragged down the road.

Well bugger. Have been taking on more water than I'd like lately. Today's trip ripped off some more bathroom sealant and bog to reveal.... Gonna need to remove the fuel tank to fix it properly. Could this be the time to strip the whole hull and patch everything up nicely? Or do I bodge it up for a few more trips?

I do like your rear view mirror idea. Time to rummage through my parts bin and see if there's a suitable one lying around

It's fun to have an engine where you can try wacky experimental stuff and if it blows up, you're left with a few hundred rebuild cost instead of thousands

Invented by Satan to keep small engine mechanics in business and developed by nazis to actually make power.