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.

Clean up day

It was far too nice a day for heavy work.   The day was spent cleaning the main lounge area.  To say it was filthy was an underestimate.  It probably has not been cleaned for 20 years though so no surprise.  The chairs are well beyond saving now.  But the table and bench are in excellent condition.  I cleaned all cushions, woodwork. walls, and floor.  It came up nice  I also cleaned the oven.  Came up ok,  At least now it feels habitable.  The porthole glass polished up fine as well.

The afternoon job was to try and get the cover plate off the large porthole.  Turned out to be not too difficult.   The porthole was covered in red paint.  I have purchased some paint stripper.  That's tomorrow's job.

The last plate went on the new platform.  Also the gangway has been started.  May take longer than anticipated due to Dave being busy.  Not a lot I can do.

Managed to get some photos of the place next door that burned down.

The best bit of the day was the weather though.  Glorious day.  The boat was ice cold though in the morning. Way warming outside than inside.  The evening was lovely too

Bath wins

A mixed day.  The primary job of the day was to tackle the two bathrooms.  The baths turned out to be bolted to the floor.  Said bolts were very large, rusted and covered in paint, under a bath and behind the legs.  Game set and match to bath.

But I did manage to remove the old sinks and pipe work.  So not all was lost.

The bathroom floors were raised.  But this made your head hit the ceiling (nearly).  So by removing the flooring it should be possible to make a walk in shower.  Much better.

The other decision to make is whether to keep two bathrooms or merge into one.  The issue is they are both long and thing.  Given there are 8 cabins it may be better to have both and try and make the shower arrangements work.  They should do.

I will need to use Dave to cut the baths out.  That can wait until the gangway is done though.

Managed a few other tasks today.  Traced all the water tanks and piping from soup to nuts.  It took some time as pipes disappear through walls and you have to go up 2 floors and back down again to try and work out which pipe coming out the wall on the other side is the right one.  But it is actually straight forward.  4 tanks with one big pipe connecting them all and connecting to a stump on deck.  The other pipe connects all 4 tanks and goes up in two directions.  The first goes into the engine room and connects to the water pump.  That then pushes water up to main deck height and to the blue pipes I can easily trace.  It also goes up to a hand pump which appears to allow the crew to get water without power.

I also had time to look at the cooker.  Its a bit old and a bit of a mess.  Only the left hand section actually holds wood to burn.  The rest is just oven.  The chimney is the pipe below.  So I traced it to the deck above to see which of the many sticky outy things was the chimney.

And here it is.  Bugger.  Good job I did not light it!

I managed to find where this hatch went.  It turns out to be the escape hatch for one of the cabin sections.  What I noted was that many of the hatches and some of the other buildings have good portholes with plates over them.  So the plate on this hatch has a great big window.  I also found a load of spare porthole glass in one of the front lockers.  Useful.

I managed to spend some time in the bow and stern sections.  The chain room looks ripe for conversion and knocking through to the bow area.  It will provide a huge living space to convert.

The door handles all need some work.  Mostly corroded brass.  Some have keys jammed in.  Will take a lot of work to clean these up but should be worth it.

All the doors are in great condition as well.  Worth restoring rather than replacing.

Finally, before leaving, I had a look under the cooker.  Surprise.  A useful tool.  It is the tool to open the various holes in the deck (see below).  I was wondering about that.  Also, I found that it had the instructions for the ship showing how many light flashes per second and blasts of the horn take place on the ship under normal operation.

All in all a productive day.  Really good to spend a bit of time finding out how this lot hangs together.  Still did not manage to trace where the shore power comes in.  The only way forward it to take off all the  million cable ties and trace the cables through one by one.  Will need to check each and every cable anyway as there are a number of alarming 'wiring' challenges.

Walk the gang plank

Its here, its welded on and it looks good and solid.

In the afternoon I finally managed to get the kitchen cooker frame out.  God knows what the were storing in there but it could have supported car engines it was so over built.

II checked out wall shown above.  It is not structural so can be unbolted and taken out.  Above this little cooking area is a ventilation pipe and very large sloping porthole.  It is covered by a bolted on plate but if removed there would be natural light into this area which will be nice.