Oh, life has been interesting the past couple weeks. The tailfeather went in (yea!) and David and John got to work installing all the floors and frames around/over it. That is from the aft end of the engine bay to the transom of the boat. They’re heartily working away as I type. We’re about out of mahogany for the laminated frames. May have to run to a close-by lumber place and pay way too much for the last little bit.

Its time to order a whole bunch more mahogany for the planking (everything above the water line and a little bit below). We’ll get the count together today/tomorrow and then the order should go in this week. It takes about a week for stuff to be shipped down from Washington state.

I’ve been going over the engine and transmission that Tom, the previous owner, bought for the boat. We’d hoped to put a Max-prop (feathering prop) on Mahdee, but it seems that the transmission reduction was set for a fixed prop. Bummer. I’ve got a call into the Cummins sales folks who sold Tom this setup. Hopefully, they’ll be able to help me out. So far, they’ve had their applications engineer stop by and take a look at how things will fit and they’ve sent over the cad drawings to that end.

Other bits and things going on: I took the rudder stock over to a local machine shop to see if they can turn it down about .25″ to get rid of “pink” where the shaft corroded around the waterline. If they can’t get rid of the corrosion, then we’ll be looking at a big chunk of change to replace this thing. Its more than 10′ long and 2 1/2″ diameter with a 10″ offset aperture for the prop.

More later…

Thread something, break something…this seems to remain the pattern (even though David denies it…wink!)

On the keel bolts, tailfeather, and floor bolts, we’ve still got stuff to thread (5/8″ x 11 threads to make and 3/4″ x 10 threads as well) For this Mahdee project, the boatyard bought a die stock and round dies for these and other sizes. But, a couple days ago, while threading a 1″ keel bolt, David broke the die stock for the round dies. So, we’ve got our hex die stock (without the proper size dies) and the round dies without a proper size die stock…

None of the local stores seem to have what we need: 2″ round die stock OR the appropriate dies for a 1 13/16″ hex die stock. They can sell us hex dies but it seems that the hex dies require a smaller hex stock…which we could buy but it looks “dinky” and we’d surely break it.

So, off to order stuff online from MSC Direct: one 2″ dia die stock to replace the one we broke (only $9.45) and then, assuming that it will break again, a sliding T handle ($22.05, that we can use with our 1/2″ drive deep sockets for this project and then for other car-related projects) so we can use a socket with the hex dies that we can purchase locally. Hopefully, we won’t break the new 2″ dia die stock so the T handle won’t be needed and we’ll just use the round dies already purchased for the project by the yard.