Getting properly hosed

Helm's deep: Mind the hobbits.

I alluded to the rehab of the hydraulic hose setup in a previous post. This was accomplished by biking a fairly ambitious distance from downtown Toronto to the north of the suburb of Brampton, home of Green Line Hose and Fittings, a well-regarded hydraulic specialist. Because I was not entirely sure if my fittings were metric or Imperial, I removed all the old, starting to weep hoses and handed them over the counter, saying to the compentent fellow there "please replicate these". And they did.

While I have two seal kits for the two helm pumps, they looked in pretty good condition, and so become spares for the future. While onerous to replace and reroute these hoses, it was a good learning experience. We have the autopilot pump in hand, but ran out of time to fabricate and weld in a stainless steel mounting plate for it, which I hope will be done this week, after which I can piece together the new and wonderful autopilot. However, we were able to launch with restored steering that is properly pressurized and is clearly needed fewer helm wheel turns to go chock to chock, so to speak. In fact, I may have to take a more subtle approach as it's that much more responsive.

Shiny is good.

Restoring the hydraulic oil was interesting. Firstly, my hose runs are long: nearly 25 feet each from the pilothouse aft to the rotary actuator pump in the stern, plus a pair of 15 footers from the aft helm on the "sailing deck". Even with the tiny cross-sections of the hydraulic hoses, that took about three litres of oil, all of which had to be bled to purge the air (using cryptic translations from the Japanese I would have run through a native speaker's brain before printing, personally). Still, can't argue with success.

Dryfitting prior to bottom painting.

The aluminum anodes are on, all 16-odd kilos of them. I had a bit of trouble with Nautilus Propeller's fulfillment from the VariProp factory in Germany; having been promised the aluminum prop hub anode I ordered at the boat show months back, they sent zinc instead. No good to me at their price, as I could get zinc at a fraction of that from the U.S.-based Boat Zincs. com. So I have a zinc prop anode on the prop and aluminum plates on the hull and fingers crossed, this will suffice (the two metals are cathodically close) for the trip down the river until haulout in October in Nova Scotia. Had I left the magnesium anode on the prop, it would've potentially bubbled and fizzed after Quebec City and the introduction of salt water...not a good look!

Better than nothing!

We switched to Pettit Horizons bottom paint, which went on thicker and more expensively. Looks good, however, and, as in the past, we changed the colour so that paint failures will reveal the previous iteration, should that be a data point worthy of note

Ready, aye, ready.

Anode what you did last winter.

The next step was launching for 2019 into an already swollen lake.