April 3, 2009

This weeks work on the dive boat brought to you by “Transmission Power”…

Filed under: Boat Building,Constance,Florida — Capn Scott @ 5:14 pm

More progress on the new dive boat…

I have the engine and transmission over at the transmission shop.

We have the transmission torn down into all of it’s pieces.  We’ve checked the bearings…

And, we’ve changed the gearing ratio from being a 2 to 1 to a 1.5 to 1.  This will give me better power and a more reasonable propellor pitch.

We found 2 plates that needed to be replaced, but everything else was in pretty good shape.

Doesn’t look like much, when you break it down into it’s little pieces.  But a good transmission is as important as a good diesel.  This is a commercial grade Twin Disc 502-1.

Though, there are alot of tiny pieces involved inside of the box.

The engine is a Cummins 6BT.  I’m reconditioning it and marinizing it.  More on it later. Time to button up the transmission and finish painting it…

Capn Scott

February 16, 2009

Glutton for punishment…

Filed under: barge,Boat Building,Florida — Capn Scott @ 7:52 am

Well..  boats are free sometimes.  I just had someone give me a boat. It is in pretty bad shape.  But, I’ve gutted the entire insides, and can build it up from the hull…  This boat has no title, so, can’t really be registered.  I have the yard bill marked paid, and could probably fight for the title.  But, I would rather use it as an ocean going barge.

Ready for transport.

Like I need another boat building project…

Capn Scott

November 2, 2006

Yin and Yang… Balance…

Filed under: Everything,Florida — Capn Scott @ 5:34 pm

To truly appreciate how great it is when you have one of those picture perfect days, you need to see the bad days… One of the reasons that I moved my dive op to Panama, was to avoid the fury of Mother Nature. So far, I’ve done 12 hurricanes with boats… This is Hurricane Frances…

frances

Fortunately, I hid in a protected river and avoided the aftermath of a Hurricanes fury… such as this…

damage

The four hurricanes that walked through Florida in one month, made the diving non-existant… Fortunately, I was able to score alot of salvage work…. some of the worst diving on the planet… This is a pic of a sailboat hitting the Buchman bridge during hurricane Jeanne… Nothing I could do, they had locked down all the movable bridges, and I was too tall to get under them… All I could do was watch, along with others.

bridge

I used to do some towing and such for the local “save a boat” operations on a contract basis… The problem was that they would only call me when it was “hitting the fan” out in the middle of nowhere or the boat was too big for them. Or, when the boat was 40 or more miles out in the Atlantic… usually coincided with it “hitting the fan” also. Kinda miss that big old research/salvage vessel… Okay… here’s a pic of her… (named her after my Great Grandmother)… “Lady Margaret”…

lady

Ohhhh… I’m getting all misty now…

January 19, 2004

01-19-04

Filed under: Everything,Florida — Capn Scott @ 4:21 pm

Topped off the tanks (97 gals). So at about three and a half hours that means that the boat at 2350 rpm was using about 27 gallons of diesel per hour. At half the rpm she burns 8 gallons per hour. Not bad. Cleaned up the dive boat and took it into town for lunch.

Seth brought in Sea Love III and it looked like they had a good fishing trip. The pelicans were around for the typical handout.

Of course, at the fish cleaning table, we had an audience. These guys were just chatting away. Did you ever hear a pelican beg. It almost sounds like one of those plastic snake straw whistles. Here’s a short video with sound of them. It’s pretty funny.

Though you have to keep an eye on them. They aren’t above pilfering your cleaned fish. Don’t leave them alone with your fish…