General Witterings -
Leaks on Rosy

Engines get hot when they are working and need cooling.  Rosy's cooling water circulates around the engine, and is cooled by passing through a slim tank, welded to the inside of the hull, the cooling being effected by the canal water on the outside of the hull.  The water is pumped round the system by a pump, and attached to the pump is an expansion chamber, the purpose of which I'm unsure.  On the underside of the expansion chamber there is a core plug - a thin, metal disk, blanking off a hole.  This core plug has dripped ever since I bought Rosy, and I've been meaning to do something about it for some time.  The easy solution is to tamp a bead of epoxy metal around the edge of the core plug.  To do this the junction needs to be clean.  The core plug, being underneath the expansion box, is not reachable whilst the expansion box is in place, so the first job was to remove it.

Step one was to drain down the engine - not too difficult.  The cylinders are drained separately.  I undid the drain plugs.  One cylinder emptied and the other didn't - it's bunged up with gunge.  BIG WORRY.  Does the gunge interfere with the cooling of the cylinder?  I'll worry about that all summer!!!

I then saw that the expansion box is held in place by two bolts - or are meant to hold it in place.  As I discovered, in my case there was one decent bolt, and a bodged length of studding.  However, both were extracted, in the case of the studding, by jamming two nuts together on the protruding end.

The bl..dy box still wouldn't move, as its inlet and outlet pipe held it rigid.  For reasons that are too difficult to explain, the outlet pipe needed loosening at both the box end and its far end, necessitating the need to replace both the gaskets.  To avoid replacing the gasket on the inlet pipe, I devised a cunning plan.  The inlet pipes nips under the engine, and over to the bottom of the water cooling tank.  It's quite a long copper pipe, and to take up the expansion and contraction as it heats and cools, it has a break (under the engine) bridged by a bit of car radiator hose, held in place on each side of the break by a jubilee clip.  By removing the radiator hose, the expansion box should lift away quite easily.  The plan was to slide the radiator hose back along on the pipes.  I struggled and swore for an hour.  The hose was in an awkward place.  It was pretty well impossible to get a good grip on it, and on the rare occasion when I did, it was impossible to move.  I finally slashed it apart with a knife, to discover that it was 19mm in diameter while the copper pipe was 22mm in diameter.  Problem - where to get some radiator hose from?

To cap it all, I STILL couldn't shift the expansion box, as the space available, and necessary bends in the pipe, make it almost immovable - so I had to break open the gasket anyway.  With the expansion box removed, another gasket (with a particularly complicated shape - a parallelogram with two square holes and round ones in it) was revealed.

Replacement gaskets arrived by post about a week later from the magical Dick Goble (he sent two of each, so there are now a set of spares), and a sudden, short visit to UK sourced a length of 22mm radiator hose.

The actual placing of the bead of epoxy metal around the core plug took about five fulfilling minutes.

The gaskets, four of them, were smeared with silicon sealant, and all the joints remade, and the radiator hose put (easily) into place.  The only hiccup was the studding that held the expansion box in place.  It proved to be such a problem that I had to hacksaw in a screwdriver slot at one end.

The system was refilled with water, which dribbled out of two of the gaskets, but which stopped when I tightened the nuts even more.

The engine started OK, and all seems to be well.  All I have to do now is to drain down the system again, and refill with anti-freeze.

I'm still left wondering whether it is worth spending three or four weeks worth of activity to cure a drip.

DIJON

I had hoped to spend next winter in Dijon, so went down on an overnight visit to recce it.  The good luxemotor Maria, with Americans Wendy and Robert on board, is there now (I overwintered in Ghent with them).  It was good to see Robert and Wendy again, and to sneak a visit to the Art Museum in Dijon, but the news is not good.  That stretch of waterway is being drained next winter for repairs, so I'm looking towards Auxerre for winter quarters.

FALCON

This past week has been much enlivened by David Long's visit to his boat Falcon.  He came with a brother-in-law.  The brother-in-law swam in the swimming pool and walked, and David tried to install his engine on new mounts, and line it up properly with the prop shaft, and I did as I was told, producing lunch (I don't do breakfasts) and a couple of evening meals and the odd tool.  I also tightened a few nuts.  There were a few tricky moments, but on Thursday afternoon things fell into place, and Falcon was able to do a few circuits of the basin under her own power.  David et al left on Friday morning, leaving behind a welcome pile of reading material.

WOOFS AND THEIR OWNERS

The Scottish gent in the boat down the quay went off to a Scottish hospital for an adjustment to his heart valve and a hernia operation (readers may recall that he righted a fallen pregnant sheep during a snow storm).  I guarded Jess the Woof.

The Scottish gent is now returned, though he has to take it easy for a week or two.  He has taken to giving us detailed accounts of the appearance of his morning ...  er ...  stools, a topic which Scottish surgeons are, apparently, much taken with, and manage to enthuse their patients.

A crap ending, I know, but I'll try and do better next week.

Toodle pip!!

Bill