So here it is after ripping off 5 feet or so and sandblasting the area.

There are more holes farther forward so more cutting. You can see all the spongy crap that accumulated inside and held all the moisture. These outlets are the discharge from the deck drains. All the snow on deck is melting!

I knew there was a small hole in the original iron rubrail on the starboard side, so I dragged the scaffold over to have a go with the welder to put a patch on it. The more I poked around, the worse and more numerous the holes became. As this is the low point in the hollow rubrail, all the crap has settled to the bottom. Add some moisture in there and it became a sponge, rusting out the half-round from the inside out. The pinhole turned into a massive failure:

I’ve started to rip the whole section of it off now. More pictures coming of the resultant damage. Just when I thought this kind of repair was coming to an end.

Oh and one of my welding units failed. The internal 240 volt fan motor died. Its a Airco 3DDRS-24-B Bumblebee welder, which I see is long out of business. Someone on the interwebs says that these were made by Miller, so maybe I can get a replacement fan from them. Luckily, I have another second Bumblebee welder still working.

++ Update ++ I was able to order a fan for a Miller SRH-444 DC stick welder and it fit in exactly. It turns out that these Airco welders were manufactured in the Miller factory. On popping the cover to my unit, it even has a Miller Gold Star sticker inside on the frame.

And I got my jury duty obligation this week too. I had already requested and gotten a deferment when I needed to do the Iggy and the Stooges show in Sao Paulo last November, so it was time to pay the piper. Sitting indoors in a heated room for a couple days seems like luxury!

I was going over the bow stem and I noticed what looked like a seam in the iron that looked pretty raggedy, so I decided to put a new pass of weld on top to smooth it out. Well wouldn’t you know that that one little thing started a whole cascade of problems. So after 3 days, I ended up removing the old bow stem cover and replacing the whole shebang.

The original wrought iron plates were mated up on either sides to the keel and riveted through. Somehow in 1887, before the advent of electric welding, they had managed to braze or gas weld a half round cap onto the front of the keel and it looks like they poured lead into the void. This nice rounded edge, after 123 years of plowing over waves and pushing through floating debris had become paper thin.

So I started to weld over the scabby weld and the heat caused the moisture inside the half round to expand and steam started to come out the pinholes in this paper thin iron, exposing all its faults. After an examination that this was not repairable, I made the decision to cut off the entire half round back to the keel.

So I had a nice 5 foot long piece of 4 inch wide by 3/4 inch thick flat stock. She is going to be a real icebreaker now! I was able to weld it at the bottom to the new steel I had installed earlier to box in the keel. It is flat instead of a more hydrodynamically superior rounded shape, but I dont care. I was able to get an excellent penetration weld between the keel iron and this flat stock and build up the weld to catch the vertical side plates as well.

And using my new bow thruster tunnel (!!??!!) , I was able to use a chain hoist to cold bend the steel into place. Very low tech! I have a piece to 2″ schedule 80 pipe that I can split lengthwise that will cap the forward edge of the keel above this flatstock. More pictures of that step tomorrow.

A 2 1/2 inch tee with a threaded plug is at the top of each leg. I also installed a thermometer and welded in fittings for the connection of temperature sending units.

The orange plugs are to keep dirt out of the coolers until the final installation.

And here is the supply leg for the same cooler awaiting sandblasting and priming!

Here is a bit of the map from 1853 showing the immediate area:

Funny that there are two houses labeled “Fisher” right where my tugboat is now. Most of the houses are set back from the Kill, which was probably a good idea except for the one Fisher house that is right on the beach!

The first shipyard in Tottenville was founded by Jacob S. Ellis in 1857 to the east of Totten’s Dock. I bet this is why the street out front is now called Ellis Street! If you look at the Google map attached at the bottom here, this shipyard must have been located in what is now an abandoned wooded lot to the west of the current Port Atlantic Marina.

Below is the map from a few years later in 1859. The train tracks (now used by the Staten Island Railroad) have come through and you can clearly see the boundaries of both the Ellis and now the Journeay’s shipyard right next door to the east of the Totten’s Wharf.

By 1912, there were three main shipyards in Tottenville – A.C. Brown and Sons, Cossey and J. S. Ellis and Son.

A.C. Brown’s shipyard is easy to put on a map as it was located on the north side of the foot of Amboy Road, which still exists. So that shipyard is off this localized google map to the southwest.

So that leaves Cossey’s to place on the map. Cossey’s shipyard existed from 1905-1926 and they mainly built drydocks and barges. Harry D. Cossey had bought “three contiguous lots along the Arthur Kill waterfront and the site ran 500 feet along the Staten Island railroad line and extended out 900 feet to the bulkhead”. There is no other landmark mentioned. I wonder where this was located exactly? Could it be where my tugboat is located now? In a Weekly Record of Marine Trades from October 5, 1918, I see an article on the building of a drydock for Todd Shipbuilding and it says that Cossey’s is located at the foot of Henry Street. Now only to find Henry Street on a map as it does not seem to exist anymore…

Here is a photo of Harry Cossey and a link to his bio:

And here is his death notice in the New York Times from 1919.

So we haven’t settled on where Cossey’s was exactly located, but here is are some cool old photos I found online of the immediate area. From www.nycsubway.com, here is a picture from 1965 of the area around the shipyard. It looks like this was taken from the top of the passenger crossover at the Atlantic stop on the train. That elevated car overpass seen in the next two pictures no longer exists. Could that overpass be Henry Street? The Outerbridge Crossing (in the background) was finished in 1928.

And here is a later undated (but later) shot of the same view from www.nycsubway.com:

John Garner, the current owner of the property, bought it in 1977. He later expanded by buying the property nearby to start the metal boat repair yard where I am located at the anchor symbol below. I will try and take a shot from the same spot tomorrow from the overpass…

View New York Central No. 13 Locations in a larger map

Thanks to my brother, Tim Fischer, for the gift of the 3/4 inch 316 stainless bolts and lock nuts. He got these for me for my birthday last year and I have been waiting ever since to use them on this project.

Here are some pictures of the recessed box when it was being made many moons ago:

Since the inlets and outlets for the keel coolers are now known inside the boat, I have started to run the piping for them. The connections to the GM 6-110 diesel engines are 2 1/2 inch and so are the connections to the keel coolers, so it only makes sense to run 2 1/2 inch piping. This is also recommended by Fernstrum, the company that makes the coolers, to maximize the coolant flow through the system. The one hiccup, is that my pipe threader only threads up to 2 inch pipe, so I have had to order 2 1/2 inch fittings that are the butt weld type. So each fitting is going to be welded on, which takes a bit more time to do.

Here is a picture of one of the first finished sections after being welded and awaiting sandblasting and primer:

Where the piping meets the engine, I have flexible high temperature silicon hose adapters and I have left a 2 1/2″ threaded tee with a threaded plug near the engine. I used a threaded tee so that I can possibly remove the plug and add a modine heater in the engine room at some later date. I also welded some 3/4 inch threaded weld-on pipe fittings so that I can add a temperature gauge, a temperature sending unit and a thermal expansion tank.

I am installing these pipes under the engine room deck plate to keep them out of the way. As some of the piping runs are kind of long (and heavy!), I am using weld-on steel flanges to join the piping sections together.

Note to self – I need to calculate the volume inside the piping, keel cooler and engine to be able to get the right sized expansion tank and enough antifreeze….

So while sniffing around the internet, looking for old tugboat photos, I found this very interesting bit of history on the web about NYC No. 13 here on the US Coast Guard website:

On February 22nd, 1967, the 82 foot US Coast Guard cutter Point Highland towed the disabled tug Hay-De and a barge following a collision with M/V Hellenic Halcyon. Hay-De was the earlier name for New York Central No. 13 when she was owned by the Kosnac Floating Derrick Corporation. The collision occured 10 miles north of Smith Point. At the time, the cutter Point Highland was based out of Crisfield, Maryland. Crisfield is in an area I know well as it’s very near the Wicomico River and Deal Island, MD where the lightship Frying Pan sank and spent many years underwater.

Wow – this collision info leads to lots of questions – Who ran into whom? How did it happen? Why and how was the Hay-De disabled?

A google map search turns up many “Smith Points” in Chesapeake Bay. There is one right on the Virginia and Maryland boarder, across the Chesapeake Bay from Crisfield, MD which seems like a likely candidate.

View Larger Map

The Hellenic Halcyon was a C2-S-B1 cargo ship launched on December 14th, 1943 at the Moore Dry Dock Company in Oakland, CA. Her original name was SS Golden Gate and she was sold in 1946 and then renamed Copiapo. She was again renamed Hellenic Halcyon in 1966 and scrapped in 1973. She was 400 feet long (measured between perpendiculars) and could carry 9,150 tons (DWT). 81 ships of this exact type were built by Moore at this location and others were built at Federal Shipbuilding in Kearny, NJ and at Consolidated Steel in Wilmington, CA. At 400 feet long, she certainly would win a battle with a 90 foot tugboat.

Here is a picture of what a C2-S-B1 cargo ship looks like:

I started looking for details on the collision as things like this will result in a legal filing of some sort!

Googling the ship names, I found a workplace safety lawsuit from 1957 from a longshoreman who fell when decending the last rungs of a ladder into a cargo hold aboard the SS Golden Gate while it was docked in Seattle, WA. There was wheat dust and kernels on the deck of the hold causing the deck to become slippery. Stevedore Shaun Maloney, fell and injured his right wrist and he was awarded $22,300 in damages as the ship owed him a “reasonably safe place to do his work”. Ruling here.

There is another later slip and fall case by another longshoreman against the vessel SS Copiapo when he fell in 1963 on some newspapers covering an oil spill thereby injuring his shoulder. Details here.

But I can’t find any more mention of this collision on the web. Perhaps it was settled by insurance and never went to court. But I certainly would want to learn more! Does anyone reading this have access to Lexis/Nexis for a deeper search?

I was wrapping up the accounts at home and doing a bit of goofing off by trolling on ebay. I have a list of special bookmarks for searches that I like to repeat – looking for specific things that I like to track and find. “Volvo P1800″, “Fiat 850″ (both cars I’ve owned in the past), “Enerpac SP-35″ (a hydraulic hole puncher I have my eye on), “New York Central” (for all the various train memorabilia) and “Keel Cooler”. One of the big mechanical pieces of my tugboat puzzle is a keel cooler for a future generator. A keel cooler is a radiator that sits on the outside of the hull that uses the colder temperature of the seawater to cool the warmer water from the generator.

I had bought the header and ends to a Walter’s 4 tube keel cooler on Ebay awhile back and I thought I had made a fantastic find. Walter Machinery is located in nearby Jersey City, NJ, so I thought it would be simple to bring my parts in to show them what I had and pick up 4 new tubes to create a working unit. Well it turns out that althought the header and the turn around end I had bought looked brand new and looked like they had never been installed, these parts were very, very old. So old that when I showed the guy at Walter’s what I had, he was stumped. Turns out that this was a first generation unit with fluted rubber seals that did not work very well and easily leaked, he told me. Walters did a redesign and went to a O-ring system that they use to this day. They had no fluted end tubes to sell me – I now had a $60 marine bronze sculpture of a keel cooler header. Like an idiot, I had even been so eager as to drill the 3 inch hole in the box I built to install this unit already! So that hole has been calling to me to be filled ever since – I can look down and see the ground below all the time I am working on my tool bench inside the boat.

Nothing has been turning up in my eBay searches in regards to a keel cooler for a year. So I decided to get aggressive and start searching harder. I started doing google searches for “craigslist keel cooler” and there were a few more promising leads but not many. But I struck gold on Tuesday when I found this – “Fernstrum Gridcooler – Heavy duty keel cooler for ship hull – $425 (Petersburg, KY (1 mile off of I-275))” on Craigslist. The ad mentioned it was 84 inches long, 7 inches wide and 2 1/2 inches deep. An absolutely perfect size. Unfortunately, the cooler was in Petersberg, Kentucky! After agreeing on a price, the seller, Jeff Hartline, mentioned that he had another one exactly the same, and he asked if I would like to buy both.

I looked into getting an LTL carrier to do the shipping, but one of the coolers had lost its original shipping box. And it seemed best to do a cash transaction and to see them and measure them exactly in person before the sale. Since I was going to have to rent a vehicle, buy gas, and drive 10 hours each way to collect this, I decided to purchase both. My recessed box can only fit one, but maybe at some point I will add another recessed box on the starboard side of the hull and use this other cooler as a heat exchanger for refrigeration or air conditioning for the boat. Hmmmm….

So here is a shot of the installed 1/2″ thick plate box I recessed into the hull. These two larger coolers are for each of the two GM 6-110 diesel propulsion motors. This generator cooler will fit in nicely in between these other two. The tabs with the holes are for a guard that will be bolted on that will protect the coolers a bit.

So with the help of an unlimited mileage Avis rental hybrid SUV (29.5 miles per gallon), I drove 1498.4 miles in the last 48 hours. I used some of my Hyatt rewards points to get a comped hotel room in Columbus, OH and catch some sleep and a shower along the way. They wouldn’t fit in the rear compartment of the Escape, even with the rear seats down and on a diagonal. So I propped them up on the center console and strapped them together and to the interior of the car with ratchet straps so if I had a quick stop, they wouldn’t fly through the windshield.

Here is the unboxing of what I bought!:

Ta Dah!

Speaking with the seller, Jeff, he told me how he acquired these. He was the high bidder on a lot through the website, www.govliquidation.com, which is a site I look at quite alot, but I have never bought anything from. Jeff restores and collects military trucks and he was looking for some parts for one of his vehicles. Sometimes with this site, you might win an auction of an entire lot of thousands of various parts and items, all in one bid. The items are all listed by government requisition number with very few photos, so you never really know what you might get when you unbox everything! Well, luckily for me, Jeff decided to sell these on Craiglist rather than take them to the scrap metal dealer and I happened to see his ad!

Santa has come early to Tottenville!

Doesn’t that really make the rivets and ribs look great? Wow – it is starting to look like something! I got the primer out because I mixed up a gallon to use outside to paint the inside of the bow thruster tunnels that I had just sandblasted. Now that all the TC bolts are welded up in the hull, I realized I could paint the inside too – so I started. It looks white in the pictures, but the color is actually light grey.

Here are some shots from the outside of the primed tunnels.

It was a gorgeous day out in the shipyard on Sunday with a stunning sunset.

I spent most of the day finishing off the guards on the starboard side bowthruster penetrations and installing the saddles. I used 5200 sealant and bronze hardware to mount the bronze saddle to the steel tunnels. I made sure to put a nice dollop of 5200 on the threads of each bolt before I inserted it. The next step is to sandblast the inside of the tunnels and primer coat them so I can install the actual gearing for the thrusters in through the top of each saddle. I dont want to sandblast with the gearing installed as I’m worried about getting blasting grit into the shaft seals.