A Few More Challenges!
Continuous all year round use has it's drawbacks as well as benefits. On the upside we make sure everything always works, the downside is we have to fix it regularly. Here's a few more things that kept us occupied:
Wood Effect Dashboard Degraded
A couple of years salt water on the dashboard and the wood effect coating started to deteriate, edges peeling slightly, cracks appearing in the coating.
Called Pete at Princess Parts and he giuded us to AXION in Sherburn in Elmet, W Yorkshire. Great helpful guys who offered to add or delete holes and fixing points from the original drawing. We agreed on a new layout, edited and exchanged drawings and paid. Al three dashboard sections were £325 the lot. Pay upfront and they arrived in 4 weeks, carefully packaged and perfect.
Then cam ethe fun! The main dash is easy. Use a 125mm dia angle grinder with thin cutting disc and cut any new areas out in the fibreglass. Getting the steering helm off is the worst job. Make sure you take out the radar/gps screen first, then you can get your hands in the back of the dash area easily. The black cowl on the morse steering is a pig to prise off without cracking it. The fixing screws for the dash are slightly different so the old holes have to be vigourously filed! Use double sided 2mm thick adhesive tape to fix the searchlight and bowthruster controls back on. Don't drill holes in the new dash under any circumstances, it will delaminate once water gets to it! Total time to fit: 4 hours.
Now the easy job should be the upper instrument panel. Prepare for serious frustration. The Volvo warning light panels are glued on! Then the audible alarms are glued on. The glue is good! Bend the old panel to crack the glue line. It's to be scrapped anyway! You need to get the warning light clusters square to their holes so place them on accurately, stick 2mm thick tape around the edges to locate them while the glue is applied and sets. The glue comes from Axion Components - remind them to send you it free! But make sure you scrape all the brown coating off the glue area before applying it. Otherwise they fall off as you are reassembling the panel! Very frustrating! Start reassembling from the centre, ie rev counters first and work outward. It's the only way to get to all the fixing nuts. Test all the instruments before finally screwing the panel in place. Replace all the instrument illumination bulbs before reasssembly with new red ones because in 5 years the old ones have all faded. Strong red preserves night vision so it's sensible for no money! They are standard automotive bulbs and cost £0.05 each on ebay. Buy 20, you only need 13 but they are so cheap you should hold spares. Total job time 4 hours again.
Fresh Water Tank Corroded
It was like a cullinder when we looked under the aft bed in the aft bedroom. Looked good from the top but once we removed it there were perhaps 100 holes evidenced by whitish-greyish deposit around 3mm dia spotted around the lower and side surfaces. I guess the maker had been grinding steel in the same workshop as he stored the aluminium sheets causing the iron particles to slowly eat their way through the aluminium over it's 5 year life. We realised quickly that despite reassurances from Princess Parts, there was no way the old tank could get out through the bedroom door. That was easy to cure, cut it up in situ. Back to our trusty angle grinder with a cutting disc in it. But that wasn't a good way to get a new one in the boat! So we ordered a tank that would go through the door, about 2 inches narrower. Not wishing to repeat the corrosion problem I had a local guy make me a stainless tank. All up cost £600 inc VAT. Great value. It took all day to remove the old tank and fit the new one. Just too long for us to get to Salty's in Yarmouth that night!
Toilet Holding Tank Corroded
A foul smell one day proved to be the holding tank, again peppered with small holes. A phone call to Pete at Princess Parts secured a new one for £650 which they kindly delivered free to the Solent inside a delivery vessel! It's easy to replace, the hardest job is getting the hoses off the old tank. All up it took three hours followed by a welcome shower to clean up! In hindsight I should have got a stainless one made from my local supplier.
Gas Struts on Cupboards
They fail at an alarming rate! I got hold of the original maker who regassed them for me for £9 each. That was 2 years ago and they are starting to fail again, so it's time to find new ones. We'll see!
Eberspacher Heating
The boat came with D4 heating which smoked a lot on start up. I had a Mikuni on the Sunseeker and smoking was a sure sign of the fuel filter getting bocked. Not on the D4! We had it serviced and £200 worse off it had a clean bill of health. Well that lasted 4 weeks and the smoking returned. The service people said I might need a CPU at £400. Well I had one of those when I bought the boat and 2 years on it's still an issue. The smoking soon transformed into refusing to start first time, second, third, fourth time ie overall dreadfully unreliable. No way was I spending any more on a defunct heater. I found brand new D5's for £900 on ebay.nl with the unit brand new and factory sealed in an Eberspacher box. That turned out to be a guy in Ickenham nr Uxbridge that installed them for a living. A bargain when you go to a dealer and spend £2200 for a D5. The guy was helpful and gave me the conversion bits. He also explained the D4 is notoriously short lived compared with all the other models and warned that commercial installations are just as unreliable. Replacing it took 2 hours and now a year down the track it burns clean and with no trace of black deposits. A worthwhile £900 to have utterly reliable heating.
New Canopy Camper Hood
The original one was tatty so I talked to davidG at Flexicovers in Poole (
davidg@flexicovers.co.uk )who make the original ones for Sunseeker and Princess. £1700 bought me a genuine new one that they came and fitted. I got 10% off for paying in advance. They did a great job, tailoring it to the boat and it was all done in 2 weeks. David is really good and knows his stuff.
Water in the Engine Bilges
I couldn't understand why the engine bilge was always wet, increasing fresh water all the time.Eventually I thought the pressure relief valve on the hot water cylinder leaked so replaced it. No change! Then I discovered that as the tank heated up the pressure built up in the hot water system and blew a little water into the bilge. Repeating this every time I turned on the immersion heater and ran the engines, caused increasing wate rin the bilge. So I piped the pressure relief valve drain out through a high level plastic skin fitting to outside the boat. Bilges are now dry! Why can't boat builders do that?
Feedback
#