Sunday Oct 17. Tired but progress.

Written by Jack van Ommen on October 17th, 2010

I decided to skip the Orthodox Church service. “You’ll never get to heaven if you break my heart or, in my case,  if I stay in Calafat”  the sixties of Dionne Warwick.

With a little luck I should be able to reach Giurgiu by Saturday and then it is a short bus ride to Bucarest, where there ought to be a service that I can understand and finally be able to go to communion again.

Marian did bring the transmission back, yesterday, and managed to machine the old flange to mate with the new transmission. Then I discovered that I had miscalculated the adjustments to the engine beds. My old Renault was hung on about 3″ hangers from the top of the beds, whereas the new one sits on top of the mounts. This meant that I had to remove 4 chunks of  2 1.2 x 3 1/2   x 6″ (65 x 90 x 155mm) from the beds. After hand sawing and chiseling for ever Marian came to the rescue with an electric jig saw. It took about ten minutes to cut the two forward chunks, which would have been nearly impossible to do by hand because there is hardly any space to move a hand saw back and forth. But then the electric jig saw broke down. And Marian was nowhere to be found. So it was back to the manual mode for the last rear mount. The “upside” of living in a floating Stradivarius is that genuine Mahogany, of which the engine beds are made, is very easy to saw and chisel. But I got it all done and just finished epoxying it all. So, tomorrow I should have the engine bedded down. I expect that there are still a few items to replace. The battery cables are most likely too short as  the alternator is on the port  side, whereas the Renault had the alternator on starboard port side.

It has warmed up but still misty and moist.

 

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