Installing a new motor

When I bought the boat, the aging Mercedes 190D had become somewhat temperamental. A homemade heat exchanger mounted on a steel tube arrangement which was glued together with epoxy, served to cool the motor while the oil cooler was reminiscent of something out of the late 1800s.

Picture of the 190D motor below. 

A mesh of wires and cables ran through the motor room and one was never sure of the motor would start after a few hours at sea. This was always a source of concern and caused us no end of trouble, failing at the most inopportune times, like when arriving in the bay in a gale and moving from forward to reverse to stop the boat!

In 2009 I changed jobs and had to relocate to Johannesburg for what I hoped would be a short while. The job took me away from all that was close and dear to me for nearly a year.

I left Lemara in the care of C.B. (name deliberately omitted) a former Western Province Hobiecat champion sailor who had fallen on hard times and taken to drugs.

I met C.B. during the buying process of the boat and learned that he was making an attempt at sorting out his life. Part of that process was to work in the marina as a handyman, building boats when he could and doing odd maintenance jobs around the marina. He was living rough in one of the boats he was building.

At my invitation, he took to living on Lamara and would call me on a regular basis, giving me updates on the state of the ropes and maintenance aspects requiring attention on the boat. He called in a panic one morning, saying that he started the motor to get the juices flowing and in the process, it broke a timing chain.

This is not a good thing to happen to a motor. Generally, it causes major damage and with a motor of this vintage, such damage is usually fatal.

I was living in a garden cottage of a mechanic and he had family in Cape Town who owned a long-haul freight company. He suggested that we move the motor to Johannesburg and take it apart to see if it can be repaired. I contacted C. B. in Hout Bay and he arranged to remove the motor and loaded it on the transport, for the 1 500km trip to Johannesburg.

Once there, we took the motor apart but discovered that we needed a set of spares which were unobtainable. The motor was scrapped.

A year or so later I was transferred back to Cape Town which allowed me to take an active part in the sourcing of a new motor.

C.B.  introduced me to Graham Raynor, who owns a pump servicing and supply company, and also dabbles in marine motor refurbishment.

Graham had a client who was selling a refurbished Mercedes 240D, which is an upgrade of the 190D but has the same mounting spacing and bell housing for the gearbox. 

Graham mentioned that, while this motor is essentially a truck motor, it was a favorite to be marinized for use in small to medium-sized boats. He found a drawing of a Bowman heat exchanger kit which was developed for the 240D in a manual somewhere and said that we should search the Internet to see if we can find the item for sale.

And after a week or so he called me to say that he had located one in the U.K!  A company called Lancing Marine had one in stock. I contacted them by email and lo, they wrote back. After some toing and froing with how to transfer the money to them, I managed to secure the last one on the shelf, and probably the last one they will ever have in stock! Graham also wanted a drive plate for the motor and they had that too.

I had the items flown out to Cape Town and delivered them to Graham's workshop. About a month later I was advised that the motor is ready for collection.

I collected it and stored it at my work warehouse for a year while I prepared the engine bed over weekends to receive the motor.

The old motor was mounted on wooden bearers which had decayed over time and were no longer suitable to serve the purpose for the new motor for another 30 years. I had to find suitable material from which to fabricate new bearers. I looked at a number of options, from recycled plastic to timber. None were found to be suitable for long term installation. I was eventually found a company close to where I work, a supplier of structural nylon, the kind of material that was used in mountings of the bogies of the roller coasters at the local fun park.

At more or less the same time, a sailor arrived in Hout Bay who was en route between Durban and the middle east but who had to work on his boat which needed some repairs. He was happy to make extra money to add to his passage kitty. Francois is one of those people who can fabricate anything from nothing and proved to be a real brick in the process of reinstalling the engine.

He accompanied me to the nylon suppliers and after discussions, they settled on two green strips of super strong stuff about 150mm wide, 50mm thick and 2 000mm long.

Francois undertook to fit the motor in exchange for some of the green stuff that makes the world go round, and upon agreement on a price, he and I collected it from my work warehouse.

Upon arrival in Hout Bay, we picked up some men on the side of the road who were looking for work and promptly manhandled the motor onto the boat using two the booms from the mizzen and storm jib. See pictures below.

 Francois and labor manhandling the motor onto the link bridge

                      

      Graham Raynor and a laborer on the finger next to Lemara 

  

Motor settled on the cockpit floor ready to be lowered into the motor room. The  Bowman heat exchanger kit is clearly visible on the facing side.

                          

              The motor is installed!

And that's where it sat for 5 years!

During that time I constructed the doghouse, Charles moved the wheel and after a 2-year stint abroad, finally, with assistance from Southern Marine, I got the motor started! It runs like a purring lion. That's a Mercedes!!

  

Rebuilding the interior

When I bought the boat, the exterior was spotty with rust and some of the armature around the bow was exposed where it had rubbed against the steel angle that forms part of the quayside construction.

However, the woodwork inside was exquisite and sold the boat to me.

The upholstery was a durable but coarse fabric with a blue background and beige vine-like design. Not particularly attractive. Around the portholes on the inside, the plastic surrounds had deteriorated badly but this was somewhat obscured by the blue curtains with vine design that matched the seating upholstery. It was the turned and shaped wood and spacious layout that spoke to me. Some pictures of the interior, when I bought her, below.

                       Galley

                          Main cabin

                         Heads

                        Forward Cabin

After a few years of sailing her, I had the notion to make some changes to the upholstery. I looked at various fabric options and settled on a plain beige format for the main cabin. I also used the opportunity to have new high-density foam cut for the seats and backrests. The change was remarkable. Pictures below.

  

Almost as soon as the upholstery was revamped, I started with the doghouse which is covered in a different part of this blog.

A second phase of the interior remodeling started when I was given an opportunity to work abroad and be paid in US dollars. I appointed a project manager in the form of Charles Moody to oversee the process of creating a new boat out the material he had to work with.

Charles is also working on his own boat rebuild and knows experts in various disciplines which included electrics, propulsion, steering, and carpentry.

Charles had a daunting task ahead of him. I wanted to move the wheel from the center of the cockpit to the forward port side. This required the rerouting of the hydraulic steering piping, the mounting of a pump against the cabin bulkhead, the installation of a new Morse throttle/gearbox control and the installation of gutters in the cockpit to handle the water runoff from the new cockpit floor.

He acquitted himself splendidly in these endeavors, fabricating bespoke steel mountings and timber surrounds to suit the new wheel position.

Charles appointed Dennis the carpenter to strip out and replace every Formica panel in the boat. These had become brittle with age and many had suffered damage when a recovering drug-addicted tenant, C.B, (name deliberately omitted) who was living on the boat, took a hammer to the interior and smashed panels, instruments and the cooker in a drug-induced rage. Needless to say, that was C.B's last day on the boat.

While at the time I despaired at the turn of events, in retrospect, C.B. did me a favour, forcing me to replace old instruments and rewire, as well as to replace the old and brittle Formica panels.

I had attempted a panel replacement process at one stage and it was moderately successful, but I had neither the time nor the skills to finish the work professionally and timeously. Pictures of my attempt below.

                    Porthole surround with Formica panels removed.

                               Re paneled porthole

While it looked acceptable, the process was painfully slow and I had no clear plan as to how to proceed with the ceiling.

Dennis is an experienced marine carpenter and between him and Charles, an interior layout was devised which is both appealing and practical. Dennis removed every old Formica panel and replaced them with clad marine ply. The vertical panels are clad with white Formica while the horizontal panels are clad with white vinyl. Charles engaged Hutch, a skilled marine electrician, to rewire the solar panels, install a battery management system and install LED lighting in the cabin.

               Pictures below of the layout as it is now.

Dennis fabricated the porthole surrounds out of wood, each one made to measure. He also fabricated circular wooden air vent surrounds to match the general aesthetic of the interior.

As part of the general work spec, I upgraded the freshwater system to include pressurized and hot and cold water. This required finding piping routes under the floorboards, installing and plumbing the calorifier I had bought from Rolf (he of To Life) to create and store hot water, and to remodel the heads. Pictures of the process below.

Completed plumbing manifold side 

Completed plumbing water tank side

The heads required special treatment. The old sit bath in this space was never plumbed in and with all respect to Les, space looked terrible. The plastic hand wash basin was brittle, the space for the loo was cramped and the bath just took up too much room. Picture below.

Charles pulled out the bath and stripped the space bare just before he left for a work stint in the U.K. I had Dennis reposition the toilet bowl and bought a hand-wash basin and showerhead to install into the pedestal he created. Picture of the unfinished installation below.

Once installed, the water inlet and outlet plumbing looked untidy and the side of the hull needed a finish too. After some musings and meditation on the matter, I came up with a finish design made up of painted slats over the hoses and on the side of the hull.

I instructed Dennis to create a slatted cover plate for the hoses and hull wall and this looked superb! This started a whole new finishing trend for the boat using painted slats as a finishing material. I also installed a rubber mat on the floor, cut to match the shape of the floor and overlaid this with a non-slip plastic tread board to prevent falling in the wet shower. The showerhead fits into the basin faucet outlet hole to double as a means to wash your hands when the shower is not in use. 

Picture of completed heads, below.

As a final touch, I replaced the wooden sliding door of the heads space with a Perspex door which I make opaque with a sandblast simulation vinyl sticker covering most of the door. At the top of the door I installed strip light which when on, creates a luminous effect to light up the heads space. So now I have a Light Emitting Door! (LED). It works wonderfully! Pictures below.

             View from the main cabin to the LED

                 

                      View from inside

                      Heads lit by the light from the LED!

Next, I had in mind to set Dennis to doing the ceiling for the doghouse using slats as the finish. Below a picture of the completed installation with strip lighting installed.

And a view from the quayside with the doghouse lights on.

  

Building the Doghouse

As I mused and dreamed about the new structure, I discovered a drawing of Lemara showing a rigid doghouse over the cockpit. This was however never constructed, probably because Les favored a larger sail area, which required that the boom be set at a position which precluded a fixed structure over the cockpit. 

My ideas started to fix on a full a plywood doghouse.  

Using photos of Lemara, I superimposed drawings and photographs of various doghouse designs onto her cockpit and consulted extensively with all who love her and have an interest in her with each new proposal. Pictures of some of the ideas, below.

While searching for more designs on the Internet, I found a drawing of a Hartley ferro yacht with lines similar to that of Lemara, sporting a doghouse that was almost identical to one that I had produced, (shown above). This picture is shown below.

The next step was to make a full-sized mock-up of the design out of cardboard. Since I work for a company that imports elevators, I have access to large, sturdy cardboard boxes. I sequestered a few of these and spent a Saturday cutting and shaping the doghouse sides and front.  All who walked past made some comment about the effort, most of them derisory in nature, but with some degree of mirth in the inflection to which I could not take exception. Picture of the mock-up below.

One friend who has played a pivotal role in the entire process, albeit somewhat understated, was Graham Raynor. He runs an industrial pump supply and servicing company but also dabbles to a greater or lesser extent in rebuilding boat motors.

When I needed to replace the old Mercedes 190D that was installed in Lemara when I bought her, Graham was most helpful in the acquisition, rebuilding and marinization of a Mercedes 240D. More about this in another post in this blog.

Graham happened to walk past Lemara on the day that I constructed the cardboard mock-up and as usual, engaged me in the conversation for a few minutes. I have learned to memorize these conversations verbatim for all the gems he drops into the chat. During this conversation, he referred me to a fellow boat owner, Roy Mcbride of CDK Boats (www.ckdboats.com), who sells plywood kit boats and rigid cockpit enclosure kits.

I quickly took a walk to Roy's boat and photographed the doghouse that he had constructed and now sells as a kit. Using a photograph of Lemara from the same angle, I superimposed a snip of his doghouse on Lemara to see what the end result would look like. For this, I used a wonderful little program called paint.net, which is a free upgrade of the regular Paint in Windows. Picture of Roy's boat, and of Lemara with the doghouse from Roy's boat superimposed,  below.

Roy's boat "Flying Cloud"

                 Lemara

                    

I decided that the kit that Roy offers looked good on Lemara as per the picture above and placed my order with him. When the kit finally arrived however my excitement turned to despair at the extent of the work involved at assembling the construction!

I received sheets of plywood, with the patterns partially cut out of the sheets, all the resin and silicone that was deemed sufficient and an offer of encouragement from Roy. See pictures below.

I  loaded the contents of Roy's garage into the back of my pickup and took it all to the yacht club storeroom. After reviewing the process for a while, I came to the conclusion that if I could build this out of cardboard, I could build it using plywood.

I had already become a regular in the local hardware store and I traipsed the well-known path once more to buy some hinges, which I used to fix the vertical pieces to each other. This allowed me to move them all as a unit, for centering purposes. 

The following weekend I secured them to the deck with internal supports and for the next few weeks, proceeded to construct the roof using a layering process of plywood with resin between the layers. My balsa-wood aircraft model building experience as a child came into play, albeit on a much grander scale. A few pictures showing the construction in progress, below.

                  As planned (1st pic below) and as-built

Cindy and I would go to the boat on a Saturday and work on the build for the weekend, eventually completing it around August 2014. Before and after pictures below.

And finally: The drop downsides were installed.

The journal of Yacht Lemara

 

About Yacht Lemara

This blog is written and maintained by

Andre Raath with the support of my

long-suffering wife,

Cindy.

Launched in 1986, Yacht Lemara is a 45-foot home-built ferro cement ketch. 

She is a Peter Strong design, commissioned by Les Leonard and built on his farm in Darnall in the then province of Natal on the South African east coast. Les named her Lemara. The name is a combination of the Le from Les, the Ma of his wife's name, Maud, and the R and A from Relations All. His daughter, Maggie, sent me a scan of the build book of the boat. 

This is the link: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2_w2zjh9-WYzBCRnlseHBzOEFOdVNsbG9FTVJmb25jdW1n/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-mCz7M62OoBffnhIG5Joz_w

Her logbook has mentions of her having sailed to the Indian Ocean islands and many who pass by her mooring spot, recognize her, having seen her distinctive lines while they sailed in those waters.

I bought her in 2006 from Andrew Kaymer who had bought her in Richards Bay some 10 years before. He reports that he had sailed her into every port and harbor on the South African coast before finally finding a home in the Hout Bay marina. 

Andrew's life plan had taken a direction which did not include Lemara and her put her up for sale. When I bought her, she had been lying at moorings for some time and was in need of some serious TLC. Her bow had rubbed against the jetty and the armature was exposed, and her deck was spotty with rust and needed a good rub down and repainting.

I undertook basic repair work with a view to spending much time and money on her when these were in abundance. My friends and I sailed her around the Cape waters for some years, sometimes having to return to Hout bay in unanticipated gale-force winds.

While I never felt unsafe in her sailing in 60kts of wind, her open cockpit made sailing in these choppy seas decidedly uncomfortable. Pictures of her when I bought her, below.

If you look carefully at the cockpit area in the photograph above, the arches that at one time supported a bimini are still to be seen. The bimini was meant to protect the skipper from being drenched by a wave wash over the cockpit, in heavy seas. The canvas had however long ago decayed and the arches now just served as a reminder of better days long gone.

While I enjoyed sailing her and had begun planning an ocean sailing adventure, I hated the exposed cockpit arrangement, frying in the scorching sun or being drenched by the cold wash or spray in heavy seas.

In 2013 I was invited to accompany a skipper and his wife, Rolf and Jacinta, on the first leg of their return journey to Brazil, in his lovely boat called To Life. This leg took them to Namibia where I said goodbye and returned to Cape Town by bus while they set sail for Brazil and eventually, the Caribbean.  

"To Life" features a bimini and canvas roof over the cockpit and this proved to be a real blessing under all sailing conditions. Upon my return, I started contemplating the construction of one for Lemara.

Picture of To Life, below.

Over the next few months, I took photos of several boats which sported bimini's and more rigid structures and looked for pictures on the Internet of similar boats with cockpit protection.