The winter of 2008-2009 was a cold and nasty one by Pacific NW standards. It was hard to get motivated to work on the old girl until spring. The cover worked out fine this winter, with the occasional snow fall smashing down several sections.

The new PT-658 "Boat House" This is a worthy goal to work towards for the 83527. They raised $100K to build this. that sure beats the white plastic tarp and PVC pipe solution.

I guess the unmentioned point of this part of the story is that they have decided to remove the airshift from the PT-658. It turns out that the transmissions they have do not have what we would now call "synchromeshed" gears. Whenever a gear shift takes place you have to be sure that the engine is at idle and the transmission has stopped turning. If not serious grinding takes place. It turned out to be very hard to hold the boat in place in the Columbia or Willamette river current. There was a tendency to shift in and out of gear a lot trying to hold position. So its back to the "MotorMac" in the engine room looking at the tachs and listening to things.

With the engine conversion to the 6-71 with the Twin Disc 8708 transmissions on the 83527, that problem doesn't exist. They were designed to be shifted between neutral, forward or reverse at almost any engine speed.

Now we are doing the design work on the mounting hardware for the shift cylinders. The electrical design is easy since the shift console is already connected to the engine room for the red-green-yellow lamps for the engine order telegraph. We have an engine driven air compressor that was originally mounted on the port engine. As you can see from the manual pages we only have to move the lever about 23 degrees, but the push or pull is very high.

The major undertaking this Spring and Summer is more progress on the crew quarters, crew mess, galley, Chiefs quarters and pilot house. With the help of Brian Goodloe from Everett we started stripping all of the mohogany down to bare wood and applying new stain. These photos show some of the work in process.

When we built the windshield on the open bridge it was slated to be a temporary installation, so cheapo steel sheetrock screws were used to secure the plastic sheets to the wooden frame. Now 5 years later the rusty screws and rusty paint look pretty bad. We decided to replace the screws with stainless steel screws and cleanup and repaint under the plastic. That project turned into a nightmare that required that the plastic for all four panels just be replaced. The sloppy paint jobs of the past and the one totally broken panel (Dan fell into it on a heavy roll coming up the coast) were just too far gone to save.

While I had Bryan available we tore out the old steel water pipe that was used for the hot water heaters and the copper pipe used for the galley water system. This was replaced by modern CPVC pipe installed from the aft end of the tank room forward to the crews head. The cold water end will be connected to a fresh water tank in the tank room and be extended into the engine room for a fresh water faucit. From this main line a pair of feeds (hot and cold) were split for the sink in the Chiefs head, galley sink and forward head.

I received a number of emails from the son of a former 83 footer ownerr in CA that had this Pannish Control for sale. It was in the spares kit in 1968. He has kept it as a memorial to his Dad until now. I have not been able to get any photo or an 83xxx number yet. He finally sold it on Ebay for about $300.

Sept 12, 2009 Video Update

Work on the crew quarters continued during the fall and progress was made beyond the videos. All new activity is moved to the 2010 Ships Log.