2009 Week 17 in Review

OTM Inc in Illinois
I spent most of this week in the middle of an Illinois corn field, but it sure felt like the bilge. The worksite is called “the bottoms,” a huge area about ten feet below the Mississippi River. It’s part of the Indian Grave Drainage District, and is kept [...]

2008 Week 48 in review

Work continues on the Catalyst
This week at Old Tacoma Marine Inc, I spent most of my time on the Catalyst, continuing this year’s big winter maintenance project. I did a lot of cleaning this week, mostly on the cylinder heads and pistons. Washington engines like Catalyst’s have a lot of very elaborately shaped [...]

2008 Week 47 in Review

Maritime networking at Brunch
I occasionally host brunch for 200 or so of my closest friends. Lots of maritime folks came to last Sunday’s brunch. Brian the shipwright, Grant the captain of the Thea Foss, Diana the maritime museum specialist, Kim of Jack Tar Magazine, Jake from the CWB, and many more showed up [...]

2008 Week 46 in Review

We took the rest of the main bearings out of the Catalyst this week. Bill and I rolled them out two at a time to look at them, clean them really well, measure them, and take pictures:

Then we’d roll them back in and roll out another two. We were careful to not roll [...]

2008 Week 45 in Review

I worked all this week on the Catalyst, continuing the big winter project.
I started out by measuring the crankshaft to figure out whether or not the journals are egg-shaped (which could, if you remember last week’s entry, be one reason that the bearings are cracked up). I took a lot of initial measurements and [...]

2008 Week 44 in review

I had a long day on Sunday, since the Catalyst was scheduled to come in at the beginning of the week – and we took two days off to sail the schooner Zodiac from Bellingham to Seattle.
Sailing on the Zodiac
I first sailed on the Zodiac in 1997, after helping during a winter yard work period. [...]

2008 Week 36 in Review

This week aboard Catalyst, we dropped off passengers at Wrangell and then took the boat to Ketchikan to start the 12-day Inside Passage trip. Summer is over here is Alaska, so it was time to bring the boat back to the San Juan Islands. Here’s the first week’s itinerary:
Wednesday, September 3 – Ketchikan [...]

2008 Week Two in Review

Engineer for a Day Program for High Schoolers
Early this week, OTM Inc received a call requesting another Engineer for a Day session for Ballard High School. We put one on in February of last year, which was both successful and mentioned in a Seattle PI article here. John Foster, a teacher in the [...]