Let there be light

I was in two minds yesterday about which of the various paint strippers to use on glass.  None of them say you can use on glass but given what glass is used for in chemistry it seemed a safe bet that if it was ok for metal it was ok for glass.  There is a real mix of options.  Some strippers appear to be so dangerous you cannot use inside as if you touch, breathe or it seems even look at its girl friend it will kill you quicker than an east end gangster in a nightclub.  But there was one product that seem to be almost completely safe short of actually getting a spoon and eating it.  Made we wonder if it was actually going to do the job.  Why would anyone buy the dangerous stuff if the safe stuff worked.

This was the cooking area.  It had to be photographed with the light on or it was too dark to capture.

This was the outside of the porthole I uncovered yesterday.

The first application of the stripper for 1 hour did a really good job.  The scraper just peeled off the soft paint with no problem and no damage to the glass.  A second application was used to get rid of the smears of more stubborn paint and some paint in pitting.

Another hour and then I washed it all off and hit it with the window cleaner.  But wait, I still cannot see through it.  They seem to have applied paint (brown) inside too!  Turns out they did not.  What they did have was the grease and fat of 60 years of irishman cooking sausages on an open grill.  

No joke, I was scraping brown grease which was at least 2mm think across the entire inside porthole.  Yuk.  All upside down too so the cleaner ran down my arms.  Moan moan moan.

The results are worth it.  Take a look at the photos below to see the amount of light now available in that area and the views up and down.

View from outside in.

The new clean porthole

Views from inside out.  What a blue sky!

What was odd though was that although the porthole was covered in grease there was nothing on the walls or ceilings.  Weird!

I sent an hour looking through the drawings.  I have identified nearly every possible wire on paper apart from the shore power feed.  So it looks like I have to take the hard route.  Identify all other cables and the one left must be the shore power! :->  I was hoping to test the plumbing but before I could use the hand pump I had to cap off one of the cold water pipes.  I bought three types of cap.  None of them fitted.  A job for next week I think.

Discussions with other people on site has led me to the conclusion that even if the tanks are found to be working the difficulty in making them fit for human drinking water may be too difficult.  What that means is that I will probably open up two tanks and fit new tanks inside them for fresh water.  Then the other two tanks could be used for grey water and black water.  Given each tank is just over 1000 gallons, two fresh water tanks even close to that will suffice and tanks of that size for fresh and grey water will last a long time before needing pumping out.

Really high tide today.  Probably due to the full moon.  Could feel Gannet floating.  Its the first time I have felt her move since she was put on the mooring.