After I painted our engine I wanted to get the rest of the engine 'ole cleaned, de-rusted and painted. While stripping the flakey bits of rust off I found a few things that needed attention, first, I noticed that a little water was seeping out from around the deck-drain (where it was welded to the swim)
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| A combination of the water trapped in the rust flakes, blocked deck-drains and bad design caused this annoying seepage, we're chopping them both off, plating them over and making new deck drains that will exit through skin fittings ;o) |
Secondly, I found that the brackets that hold the weed-hatch lid down had almost rusted away, this should have been picked up on the pre-purchase survey, Grrrr!
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| Very glad I decided to go the whole hog and clean everything back to clean metal or I wouldn't have found these problems before they became a bigger problem. |
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The third problem was a diesel seepage from behind the weedhatch, but I couldn't see exactly where it was coming from.
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| Tiny pinholes hidden behind the remnants of the weedhatch flange. once again a moisture trap had been created causing this to rust through. |
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| After cutting off the top edge of the weedhatch a length of angle-iron was welded on. |
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| A nice new shiny weedhatch flange, the bottom edge of the fuel tank has been re-enforced and the deck-drain has been chopped back and will be removed and plated. |
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| After chopping off the weedhatch brackets we cut the rusty bit off and welded new bottoms onto them |
Once the welds are ground back and the metal treated with rust-converter, I'll prime it all and then give a good few coats of light grey garage floor paint.
