Sunday, April 30, 2017

April 2017 | MONTH IN REVIEW


Here's quick summary of what we were up to this month. 

  • We re-painted the surface on which the windlass sits and re-installed the windlass in the anchor locker.
  • Last month we removed the fiberglass panel in the head (part of the shower) to access the bolts on the sail track. We were surprised to discover that there were no nuts on those bolts! It's obvious the sail track was installed after the shower. Even though it's only about a meter of the entire ~6.5 meter track that had missing nuts, it's not something we'd like to take our chances on. So we added a backing plate and replaced the bolts and added nuts before re-sealing the panel again.
  • We spent a lot of time studying the Yanmar Parts Catalog. Not only to identify all the gaskets and o-rings we needed to order, but also as a reference guide to re-assemble the engine.
  • We met new friends Walter and Ae (from Australia & Thailand) on S/Y Baan Mai, who turned out to be friends of Rolf and Daniela. :)
  • Another month of hard work! How do we keep our spirits up? We treated ourselves to a tub of Haagen Daz ice cream of course! {an early birthday celebration for Alex!}

Check out our posts this month:

How To Customise Your Blog on Blogger

Installing New Engine Mounts

 

March 2017 | MONTH IN REVIEW >>

May 2017 | MONTH IN REVIEW <<


Ice Cream!

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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

How To Customise Your Blog on Blogger

Several days ago, the free third party template that we were using on our blog stopped working properly. The cool photo slider feature for each post unfortunately crashed (no idea why) and no idea where to even start looking, let alone try to understand or edit the six thousand lines of HTML code.

After several failed attempts to restore the template, tired and frustrated, I decided to do away with the fancy pre-designed template and start afresh with one of the simple theme blogger templates available and customise it on my own.

Sure - the blog doesn't look as fancy as it did before, but at least it's ours, and we can build the code slowly. Perhaps one day we'll be able to customise it with some of those fancy features we lost. Who knows.

It's amazing what you can find on the Internet. Plenty of information on how to do this and how to do that, but of course not all are worthy. You have to search and read through a whole load of -- to find what you're looking for.. (for me at least)

Anyway, thought it might be useful to share the links I found. If you're interested in personalising your blog, check out some of the things you can do below.

But before you start (based on experience), I would highly recommend to:

1 - 'Backup' your template often and before you make any major changes. In case you don't already know where that is, go to

Theme > Backup/Restore > Download Theme

If things go wrong, you can always restore your old theme with the backup file.


2 - Always add notes/comments to explain what the code does so that you can find it at a later date or if the changes didn't work, you can edit/remove it. 

HTML Comment Tag: <!-- notes/comments --> 

 CSS Comment Tag: /* notes/comments */

Any texts within those comment tags will not be interpreted.


So here are the links:

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Saturday, April 1, 2017

Installing New Engine Mounts

After we finished spray painting the engine parts. It was time to install our new engine mounts. 

Check out our rusty old engine mount on the left below (which we've replaced multiple times throughout our journey), and the new Poly Flex ones we installed on the right. These mounts are moulded from heat cured polymer alloys which are long lasting and oil/fuel resistant! Let's hope they'll perform as advertised.

Old Mount 
(one of the better looking ones)
New Mount
(made of polymer = no rust)
The new mounts are unfortunately a lot taller than the original mounts. So we had to make some modifications to our engine "rack". See photo's below.

Cut out wood for new mount
Nothing is ever simple or easy to access - Alex had to cut the wood from under the boat
Next, sand and level the surfaces
Apply layers of fiberglass with epoxy
Sand & measure to ensure that the surfaces are level
Note: We had to add more fiberglass & epoxy on some areas
Sand, measure till satisfied & drill holes for the mounts
Install mounts, measure and adjust till the mounts are level

Time consuming process but finally installed, leveled and ready for the engine! It always feels good to scratch an item off our very very long list! ;)


Other related posts:

Hauling Out Our Engine

Spray Painting Our Yanmar Engine

How To Clean A Heat Exchanger

Rebuilding Our Yanmar Engine

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