Smooth sailing

Some days feel like I get nowhere; others, like today, I gallop. Here's what all got accomplished:

I started out by getting the 80 amp breaker wired into the panel for the welder. Couldn't afford (or didn't want to afford) a price for a new breaker, so I found one on Ebay for 15 bucks. The welder, a behemouth of a thing, pulls 80 amps at 240 VAC. So, I'm that much closer to welding on the hull.

I got the wiring figured out and fixed on my big trailer air compressor. Since it's designed to be used by guys in the construction trade who, no offense, just wanna gettr done and won't be keeping an eye on engine gauges, this thing many fail safes. The engine will shut down if there's low oil pressure, or if the manifold temp gets too high or if the compressor pressure gets to high or if the engine overspeeds. When any of those things happen, it cuts of power to the coil AND shuts off fuel to the carb.

Fine. But what was throwing me was the fact that I couldn't get voltage thru the sensors and to the coil. Seems like the problem was in some missing circuitry...Turns out that they had installed a starter button that you hold in to bypass all the sensors and energize the system so you can start the engine. When everything is running, then you let go of the button.
Well. Yeah, now I know this! The button said "Push to start" so I just thought it was a starter button to crank the starter motor. Their lack of specificity and my assumptions added up to 4 hours of wire-tracing and head-scratchin'. But, it now runs great.

And, finally, I got a fuel system rigged up for the Wisconsin/Hobart gas welder. A friend gave me an Evinrude gas tank from his old outboard motor. Well, actually he gave me two and I told him I'd sell the other one on Ebay for him in return. I hooked the hose up to the fuel pump on the Wisconsin engine and that'll work just fine. I can even use the pressurizing pump on the tank to prime the system after it's sat for a prolonged period of time.

So I got the shop welder hooked up to do hull repairs, got the air compressor running to power my sandblaster, and got the fuel system running for my gas welder which I'll use to weld up the tracks on Millie the crane out in the field where she's far away from electricity and my shop. Millie is crucial to this project because she does all the heavy lifting of boat hulls and related equipment.

And all this after church and before supper. Yep, I'd call it a galloping day.

millie, my NW 25 crane

Years ago, I spotted the pumpkin orange color while driving to the airport in Wenatchee, WA. Sure enough, it was a Northwest Engineering crane, a NW 25 model with crawler tracks.

I never got serious about bringing it home until now. Now being the day that I paid the bill from the crane company for offloading the seam mule from the lowboy trailer. 1500 dollars to lift it one ft in the air and then lower it four ft after the trailer drove out from under.

So, I enquired. "You can have it for nothing. Take the damn thing outta there." was what the owner said when I reached him by phone. Worked for me. I was underneath the belly of the thing wrestling with a stuck bolt and wiping grease off my cheek when I heard someone. "So, you're going to try to get this thing started, too, huh?" I shimmied on out. Turns out that a number of guys had tried to get this crane running. "Hasn't run since the day they parked it in 1973." Turns out that even then they had to pull it off the lowboy with a dozer. I began wondering what I've gotten myself into here. I'm not looking for another project of tired iron--I'm looking for a working crane to lift sea mule sections. Three months and a dozen trips to Wenatchee later, I've got this crane all loosened up, lubed up, tuned up and able to load itself on a truck for the ride back home.

It seems that somethings can just be sleeping, waiting for the right person, with the right touch to wake them up.