It's Election Day Eve-eve-eve, and many people are digging out from the mess left by Hurricane Sandy. This is a perfect time to share how-to tips on projects, repairs, and more. For anyone looking for a fix to basement flooding, there was a great article last week on sump pump installation.
SMHRB is the little corner of the Great Orange Satan where we talk about our homes, how to fix them, how to upgrade them, and what kind of stupid the former owner left behind. For just about any project, there's someone who's done it before and has all kinds of helpful advice. All are welcome, from the newbie to the professional.
For starters, I have a little project I did on my own house. A few years back when we had the furnace replaced, the installation guys left a goofy looking hole in the closet where the furnace lives. On the other side of the knotty pine lives an oil furnace a little smaller than a refrigerator. The old installation had the exhaust running inside a big square duct of sheet metal, the remains of which are still on the wall.
The irregular hole has been bugging me for years, so I finally got off my butt and did something about it. After an afternoon of wrestling the furnace exhaust pipe apart, trimming the old duct wall a bit, and installing a cover plate, everything looks a lot better. Not perfect by any means, but it looks a little less like monkeys did the installation.
I also promised some pictures of the big boat project we have running at a nearby shipyard. This is the biggest fishing boat built in the US since 1989, and is built with efficiency in mind. Because of the efficient power plant, it's expected to use about 300 gallons of diesel less per day than a standard boat this size. When diesel costs upwards of $5 a gallon, that adds up pretty quickly. In about 6-9 months, the boat will leave the shipyard to fish the Bering Sea, catching cod on longlines. Longline gear gives the highest product quality and least environmental impact of any of the major gear types, so the 20 tons a day this boat packs in will be just about the greenest in the world.
Anyway, off the soapbox and on to the pictures. First up is the bow. As I mentioned last time I talked about this project, the boat is built in modules. This is the very tip of the bow and the bulb, which will be underwater all the time. the guys on the right are about to hang the main deck plate in place. If you look closely, you can see fine white lines on the side of the bulb, which mark out where the plate was formed. At each line, the plate was put into a press brake and bumped just the slightest amount. Old sheet metal hands will recognize the technique as a way to get all kinds of shapes out of a flat piece of metal.
Just a little aft of the bulb is the bow thruster (Hey! You in the back! Stop snickering and pay attention. It's not my fault the marine industry uses suggestive names. Ask me about buttock lines and breasthooks sometime.) The bow thruster is a propeller in a tube, in this case with a 400-HP or so motor attached. The skipper uses it to push the bow one way or the other when fishing or docking. In the next pictures, you can see the structure behind the thruster tube. Every piece of steel is precut by computer, labeled, and marked where it meets up with every other piece.
And here you can see the finished structure from the outside with the little fairing plate that helps water go past the bow thruster tube a little easier. The two laws of hydrodynamics are Don't Surprise the Water and Put It Back Nicely When You're Done. You can also see more of the forming lines on the shell plate.
So now we get to the assembly. First up is a side view of the boat, so you can see how the bow thruster and the bulb fit together.
And a shot from the bow. The finished boat will go up another deck from here, so the bow will be about 10 feet taller. The waterline will be between the top of the bulb and the top of the plating you see here, depending on how heavily the boat is loaded. The keen observer will also see the piece of equipment hanging from the crane in the foreground. That's a plate freezer, which takes 20-kg pans of cleaned fish from 40 degrees to -25 degrees in a couple of hours. This one looks like it can take 90-100 pans at a shot, about 2 tons of fish. After the fish is frozen, it's taken out of the pan, bagged up, and sent into the hold. Needless to say, there is a big refrigeration plant on the boat to make all this happen.
And finally, a comparison of how the computer models we build become reality. The first shot is a rendering from the computer, showing the forward part of the engine room. Notice particularly the pipe manifolds on the bulkhead. The second shot shows those manifolds in real life. The foundations in the foreground will take the generators you see in the rendering.
So, what are you working on, and what are you doing to get out the vote?