Sunday, February 04, 2007

2/4/07 - Baby steps for Makeover

I promise not to bore you with post after post of 'fix it' words and pictures, but what I'll do instead is keep this one report of the repair and simply re-edit it with the steps. If you're interested, feel free to keep checking back here. If you're not, it's simple to passover.

Step 1 - Emptying out between 75-100 gallons of fuel. Our car and SUV are sitting on Full now and every one of our neighbors got at least 5 free gallons of fuel for their cars. It was quite the Olive Branch of peace and friendship to them. It's not every day that somebody asks if they can fill up your car. We still have more fuel, even with 15 gallons sitting in jugs. Umm..... I'm sure in a few days we'll need a little bit more. One guy suggests putting a sign in the yard for $1/gallon gas. It will go fast.







The hose goes from the sq cut down the hatch, out the hole in the back of the boat, into the red gas can.
Step 2 Take the rest of the week off from work. Recruit all willing family members.
Clean all the foam off top of tanks (water & fuel). Then disassemble all lines from the helm to the engine. (This took a few hours itself.)

Left is cables intact.




Right is cables set to the side.



Step 3: Dig foam for 3 days with screwdrivers, pipes, pry bars, homemade stuff, etc around the edges of the tank and try every which way to hoist the tank out of its coffin. Hoisting didn't work alone, so we also added 1x4 and later 2x6 boards with pressure applied to move the tank from side to side (breaking the lower foam). Today (2/9), we finally heard foam cracking and saw movement. Tomorrow will be the big day that it comes out!!

First we tried the hoist connected to the carport beam. NOT!
Second, car jack on 4x4's, laying on floor. Better.
This is the little "tunnel to Alcatraz" that we spent 3 days digging. (Tank on top, coffin on bottom) This is the wide spot. The other side sometime was so tight we could barely get a screwdriver 18 inches down to the narrow bottom. Our tree saw ended up being very helpful.

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