Saturday 26 March 2011

2 plumbers plumbing

In desperation I went to 2 plumbing supplier this morning to try and determine what the water piping was.  The main plumbing suppliers had no idea.  Nothing they had fitted.  The smaller supplier had some thoughts on the matter.  He thought it was probably American UNF thread (I think). Useful information only to some extent as he also had nothing that would fit.  So as usual I resorted to violence.  Crushed the end of the pipe in the vice in the engine room and then soldered the end.  Should be ok for the temporary fix.

The second job of the day was to map the generator control cabinets with the aim to try and trace where the  shore wires come in.  It took nearly five hours but I managed to map most of the cabinets.  Luckily 4 of the sections (one for each generator) were identical so I only needed to map one.  The final one was more complex as it had the distribution panels in.  There are literally hundreds of wires but all of them are labelled and numbered.  So I wrote down and drew each switch and which wires went in (or possibly out) of them.

The end result was lots of drawings which I managed then to join the dots on.  And bingo, found where ( I think) the shore power enters the system.  The downside is that I can see where the wires disappear our of the cabinet into the floor and then come up behind the cabinet as a set of painted same size generic cables which in turn go through the roof of the engine room.  The issue is I cannot tell which one the cable is that comes out of the other side.  What I could clearly tell was that the wires that went into the floor were modern.  One red, one blue and one yellow earth.  All of them big buggers.

There are two external sockets on the boat.  On in the wheel house and one out the back.  I dismantled the one out the back only to find it had different (older) wiring.  So that socket is not the one.  The one in the wheelhouse was likewise aged.  This is going to do my head in.

However, if I am right then there is a change that I could simply remove the cables in the cabinet and then wire in the mains bypassing this cable.  Unless I can somehow determine which cable it is after it disappears under the floor out of the cabinet I see little option.

Some photos of the cabinets to give you some idea of the complexity.




 











The gangway is coming along well.  It will be up next week and ready for the weekend I have been led to believe.




I took some photos of some odd cages with metal bars in them  The bars say Chromalox on them.  It appears (most likely) that they are in fact heaters.






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