2010 Week 12 in Review

The green giant

The green engine paint for the Maris Pearl was a hit and the brighter lights make the engine room feel bigger, so we’ve gotten the go-ahead. We’ll clean and paint and clean again and see how much paint sticks and paint again until it’s done.

It sounds simple, but I see this as a commitment to a new color and a plan to maintain the color, rather than a one-time “paint job.” The engine will always shed some paint, so occasionally it gets touched up and after working on it, I always touch up the chipped parts and the new parts.

Update on the Lightship No. 83

We’re still working on the boiler plate documents for the Lightship RFP. They say it shouldn’t be hard, it’s all in the manual – an 800-page document.

Clear space!

With the Washington injectors for the Pacific Yarder sent back to California and an hour or two spent mopping the floor, my bench and the space around it is all clean. It’s good to have the shop clear – even though the void will fill up quick.

2010 Week 11 in Review

Painting on the Maris Pearl

Last week we got the go to paint the Enterprise in the Maris Pearl; this week we started prepping it.

I did a bunch of cleanup first, just so some paint would stick, then I emptied a few rattle-cans of Rustolum’s dark hunter green paint on the engine to test the color. It’s a little dark, but it fits the requirement of being heavy duty and awesome. I’ll change out all the lights for more wattage next week and see if the extra light will be enough to go with a dark green engine. It’s important to consider these things when the engine takes up about 700 square feet of the room.

Finishing the yarder injectors

Also this week I finished the Washington injectors for the Pacific Yarder in California.

The set-up was easy, but the pressure-balance system seems to put much more force on the stem than the spring-balance. When they open, the pressure drop does weird things to how it closes too. See, the pressure-balanced Washington injector has a hydraulic cylinder on the top of the stem and a small spring to seat the stem when there is no pressure. When the fuel pressure comes up, the hydraulic cylinder forces the stem down. When the pressure is high, the force on the stem seems excessive and more difficult to open. The problematic part is that when the valve opens, the pressure drops, the force on the stem decrees, and the valve does not snap closed as quickly.

This makes timing sloppy, and there’s not really a way to predict how to make up for this sloppiness. It’s a neat idea, but it’s crude – and was only used for a little while. The spring-balanced injectors replaced the pressure-balanced injectors pretty early in the Washington line.

Update on the Lightship No. 83

We’re still working on the Lightship #83 Request for Proposals for Northwest Seaport. I attended a contract writing class at the Department of Transportation, which was useful but also raised more questions than it answered. The regulations involved in this project are very difficult to figure out; worse, they’re buried in road and bridge-building regulations.