Helping a friend rerig his boat.
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Cracked block
Posted by – August 8, 2009
So, we finally bought an outboard a few days ago. It’s an older 3.5hp Tohatsu. It didn’t look great but it ran fine and we were about to park the car so we didn’t have much choice. We figured it would get us by for a bit and serve as a decent backup once we find a better one. I pulled it apart to clean it up a bit and a bolt sheared off in the block. After two days of trying to get it out I have a handfull of broken drill bits and extractors and a cracked block which makes it not worth repairing. Ugh.
The rudder is off!
Posted by – June 20, 2009
Whoever put this thing together welded mushroom heads on the ends of all the underwater bolts. Those had to be ground away which means we now need to source some replacement silicone bronze hardware.
The rudder is a bit waterlogged, which we expected, and needs to dry out for a while. We’ll patch it up and give it a proper epoxy coating before it goes back on.
Some really good news is that the gudgeons, part of what holds the rudder on, are fiberglass and not stainless. They apparently switched sometime during the year ours was delivered so we weren’t sure which we’d find. Stainless doesn’t last below the waterline and there isn’t a source for replacements.
