The engine compartment is now bare.

Finally got down there yesterday, and with about two hours of work with zip disks, hammer and chisel, and a crow bar, the old mounts are completely gone. I’ll strip them down to perhaps use some of the material but they are no longer in the boat. I have to say, the zip disk does a good job of taking apart welded joints, assuming you can get the right angle on them. Basically I just ground away all the welds on the forward supports, whacked a chisel in to the joint to spring the last bit of weld I couldn’t reach and then with the crow bar forced the mounting beam up and over until the weld at the aft end broke. I was expecting more of a fight, IE having to cut away the aft end welds but it appears that they were pretty small in size and not that great. The mounts didn’t put up much of a fight.

The next thing that needs doing is to cut out the shaft log. I should be able to get that done in about half an hour on Wednesday. The area is a mess right now, piled up with rotting floor beams and bits of hose and other garbage sitting on top of a mess of oil, dirt, sawdust, and disintegrating paint. So the first day will be a clean up day, including grinding the broken welds flush and generally cleaning up the work space, then its off to the supplier for the material to fab up the new mounts.

The biggest bits will be the angle iron for the mount rails, the vertical supports, and the 1.5 inch schedule 80 pipe for the shaft log. Some of the old mount can be reused for the verticals but with a shorter engine, which hopefully will be farther aft, I may need to build an intermediate frame over the bottom two chines. If so, some 2 1/2 x 3/8 flat bar will be needed.

The dummy engine is almost complete, so once I have the steel I can use it to get the engine as low and as far aft as possible, and still have clearance for the oil pan and the shaft coupling.  I plan on making up the engine bed, with a 7 foot long pipe attached, which will become the new shaft long. The shaft log will go out through the hull bottom, be secured to the existing prop strut and then the bed can be raised and lowered, moved fore and aft as needed to get a nice fit. Then the verticals will be welded to the hull frames and to the engine bed. Once that’s done, the shaft log will be welded to the hull bottom in a box  housing which will allow for a decent weld all around. The existing shaft log had a poor weld at one point which led to its complete corrosion.

 

Off in the left upper you can see the framework for the fuel tank. The new tank is larger, so that will be modified. The long hose goes to the manual bilge pump. Lower right is the wood floor beam that went across in front of the steel frame  in the bottom of the picture. Other bits are the floor plates that were taken up to get access to that frame, so I could grind the welds away.