Four Days and Counting

September 28, 2020

Welcome back!

When Debbie and I returned from our first Loop this past November, we spent the following couple of months enjoying the holidays and reacquainting ourselves with friends we hadn’t seen since our original departure. Once 2020 got here maintenance began on Whisky Business in earnest. We are the 5th owners of this boat and since prior owners did not put many operating hours on the engines important maintenance had not been performed. WB had around 1600 hours on the twin Cummins diesel engines when we purchased her. Not many for a 20 year old boat. Our previous 7500 mile journey put 860 hours on the engines which necessitated a boatload (pun intended) of work. Ya see the spiderweb of tubing on top of one of the engines? Fuel injection lines that had to be removed along with the valve covers in order to remove the fuel injectors and adjust the valves. This should relieve the soot issue on the stern and give us better fuel economy.

The image below is the heat exchanger. It is essentially the radiator for that engine. The water pump brings in raw water and pumps it through this device. Inside are a large number tubes that the coolant runs through being cooled by the raw water that then exits with the exhaust. It had to be removed to be flushed out. This is the easy one to get to. On the other engine the heat exchanger resides between the engine and the fuel tank. I had to rig a block and tackle to remove and replace, all the while lining up 3 water hoses that plumb it.

This device is the after cooler for the turbo charger. The turbo charger adds pressure to the air intake which makes considerable horsepower. Due to the heat produced by the turbo, which is driven by hot exhaust gasses, a cooling device must be used. Like the heat exchanger, on the other engine it is located between the engine and the fuel tank making the job of removal and reinstallation a real bear.

These 2 gems are the start batteries for each of the engines. If you have a 3 liter, 6 cylinder engine in your car, the engine would require 180 cold cranking amps to start the engine. Each of these guys puts out over 1300 cold cranking amps of power. These things weigh about 160 lbs each and they are HUGE! The battery cable setup I have is WAY less than desirable so tomorrow Kentuckiana Yacht Services will install bus bars to get a lot of the cables off the batteries and bring my system up to code.

The device below is an inverter. It converts DC current to AC current, but you knew that, right? Believe me, I don’t get it either. Great minds have tried to teach me about electricity but I just can’t get my head around it. ALWAYS hire experts to do this type of work on the boat. The inverter has it’s own set of batteries (5 largish in my case) that power all of the systems on the boat when at anchor and not using shore power. It runs the refrigerators (2), freezer, all outlets and lighting. After 7 or 8 hours I have to run the generator to recharge the inverter bank of batteries. Or, I can start the main engines and the alternators will also recharge the inverter bank while under way.

I read a post recently on a cruising forum where a member removed the hatches from his water tanks and what he found was not pretty. Debbie and I always use a water treatment when we fill our tanks and have never experienced bad tasting water. At the beginning of the boating season we treat with bleach and flush out numerous times before a final treatment of our water tanks. Over the previous weekend I removed the tank hatches and found…NOTHING! Tanks were spotless. Can you guess where the 2 water tanks are located?

Other maintenance items:

Replaced the deck switches for the anchor windlass

Replaced all fuel and coolant filters

Replaced one of three air conditioner blowers

Replaced a solenoid on one of the AC motors

Replaced a solenoid on our REALLY LOUD HORN

Replaced all of the engine zincs. These are just pieces of zinc that screw into the engines so if there is any electrolysis, the zinc gets consumed instead of critical engine components.

Replaced coolant in both main engines and generator.

Some upgrades:

Had this barrel head from a barrel of Old Forester we purchased. Took it to the folks who engraved all of our whisky bottles and had “Whisky Business” added.

Did not care for the grill we had onboard. Replaced with a Weber Q. Installed a 20lb propane tank in the deck box.

One of the first boats we looked at while we were boat shopping had a stand up engine room complete with a work bench. Always wanted a work bench on Whisky Business, but where to put it? Space is always at a premium. So I built a mini workbench. Yeah, just bolted a vice to a 2X6.

One other upgrade we made was to the transom (back of the boat) Beneath our port of call (Louisville, Ky.) we added:

Bourbontown, USA

Cross your fingers, it is Monday night and our departure is planned for this Friday. Will keep you posted.