A long week on the Maris Pearl
Last week OTM Inc visited Alaska Copper and Brass a few times to expedite the heat exchanger retube for the Enterprise in the Maris Pearl, but they just don’t seem to want to finish it.
We started this job three years ago, after finding more leaking tubes in the heat exchanger every year. I hammered in taper pins as plugs to stop the leaks as they sprung up, but this was only a temporary solution. The owner wanted something more permanent and decided to stop the leaks by replacing the old tubes.
I met with two companies in Seattle that do re-tubing like this: Case Marine & Industrial Inc and Alaska Copper & Brass. The AK Brass quote was slightly lower, so I sent them the heat exchanger.
From there, the project grew. We learned that there would be a minimum order on the tubes, so we paid for extra tubes that would be sold for scrap. Then we learned the order would take six months to fill. That was too late for that season, so we paid the deposit and left the cooler there for two years. Meanwhile, we used the oil cooler for the jacket water cooler and made do without oil cooling. This season, the Maris Pearl’s owner made replacing the heat exchanger a top priority for winter maintenance, which is why I’ve been trying to get the job done.
On Monday, I visited Alaska Copper & Brass again. To my surprise, I see no progress even after their assurances over the phone, so I put on safety glasses, grabbed some tools, and started messing around. This got the AK Brass guys all fired up. I asked the managers if I could work on heat exchanger since they obviously cannot. In response, I had to listen to a bunch of whining about how the worker walked off the job and how the union will not allow me to work in the shop and on and on.
I really should have just taken the project to Case Marine two years ago.
After all that fuss on Monday, I started getting two calls a day with progress reports. By Thursday, it was finished and on Friday I picked it up with Dan’s big truck.
Meanwhile, work progressed on the Maris Pearl. On Thursday, the owner and I moved the boat from Shilshole to Ballard oil, where I started to disassemble the plumbing.
The owner also asked me to record all of Old Tacoma Marine Inc’s past work in an online database so that he can track the work—and the money he’s spent on it. Since we’ve been working on the Maris Pearl since late 2003, it took about six hours to go through all the records and enter the work in. It was excruciating, but now it’s neat to see all the information in one place. I hope that we can do this with all our clients at some point.
