Mineral spirits in the ship's oil lamp

Weems & Plath Trawler

We have ourselves an awesome Weems & Plath Trawler Lamp in between our galley and cabin table. Until recently, we've used standard issue paraffin oil to keep it going. It's a bit pricey however, so I asked around at what other people do. Because sail boats are very traditional, improvements can be found all over the place, because nearly everyone has the same challenges you do.

Mineral spirits (odorless, not "low odor") is 32% the cost of paraffin in most of the places I've found, so I gave it a shot. Not only is lamp still working, and I'm not on fire, but it's also cleaner, and the light is much brighter. Mineral spirits is useful for other stuff to (taking paint off of brushes, etc), so it falls into the double-duty category, which I also love.

It's a bit more flammable then paraffin, and is on par temperature wise with kerosene, although it's much cheaper. I found the wikipedia article on kerosene lamps, then a usenet person asking roughly the same thing.

So don't hold me accountable if your boat (or home) burns down, but for me, I've been pretty happy with mineral spirits in the oil lamp so far. My friend also told me that at Smart & Final, you can get liquid paraffin (the "normal" fuel) pretty cheap. I'm sure however that you can still get mineral spirits even cheaper, because it has an industrial value.

One other thing I wanted to mention is that on most evenings, so far, the oil lamp is enough to keep the boat warm, and we don't need the real heater to be turned on. The lamp puts out a decent amount of heat, which is another reason I'm considering putting it's smaller cousin into the v berth. $120 for the little light, and another $45 for the gimball mount. 12 hours of burn time on the little lamp, which for me equates to about a week or so of reading in bed every few nights for an hour or two.

As always, be careful about carbon monoxide. It's odorless, deadly, and will sneak up on you without warning. In fact when I was a kid, a neighbor of ours took his family on a house boat in Lake Powell. A small fire broke out near the air conditioning intake, and the entire family was killed during the night.

I'm healthy! Time to re-route the propane!

Oh propane! Behave!Last night I thought I might head into work, because I'd feel well enough. I instead decided to play it smart and take today off as well, and I'm glad I did. I managed to get a lot done around the boat, but I needed to move at my pace, and I was still hacking up gross stuff.

I had installed the new stove a while ago, but the propane line wasn't routed properly. Propane is a great thing to have on the boat, but it's extremely flammable. The previous stove was kerosene, which is very safe, but a real pain the ass the cook with. Propane is clean, hot, cheap, and insanely dangerous. The main problem is that it's heavier than air, so if it leaks in the boat, it collects in the bilge. Then a spark shows up from somewhere, and the entire boat explodes into a huge ball of fire.

The secret is to be safe with your install. My propane hose is roughly 50' long, and there's only two openings. One at the tank, and one at the stove. No T fittings, no nothing. Barring abrasion or hose cuts (which a good install and regular inspection protects against), the only two places it can leak is the tank (on our boat it sits over the water, so that's no big deal) or the stove itself.

Check out the technique that I use to check for leaks. It's the common "suds method", where you take some soap suds water and put it around the seals. If it bubbles up, you have a leak. Re routing the propane is a bit tricky, because you need to go through bilges and a lot of the ship's structure. You need to be cognizant of things that might heat up, bump into the line, and certainly things that might cause abrasions.

Bilge! You stink!If you check out the picture on the left, you'll notice all those hoses going across that black thing. The black thing is our 150 gallon diesel tank, and the hoses are all the multitude of fuel, air, sea water, fresh water, and now propane sources coming and going, all that make it so that the boat runs like a champ.

Dahon HeliosLike all projects, I needed two screws that I didn't have. I've been monopolizing Charlotte's bike lately, but it makes for such convenient access to San Diego Marine Exchange. I hopped on the bike, and ten minutes later I had the screws and washers I needed, and was back doing the install.

When I yanked the stove I also cleaned behind it again. I think I'll make that a regular field day item, since it also allows me to inspect the propane line and fittings, which is important.

Charlotte and I went to Pizza Nova for dinner, and tomorrow I have a pile or work in store for me at my day job. I haven't touched Visual Studio, or anything related to my professional life, in nearly a full week. It's funny, but being sick is the only time that I really disengage from my technical life. I feel guilty admitting it, but it was really nice to be able to distance myself from .Net for a week. My motivation for being as go-go-development as I am stems from it helping me to achieve other things in my life, and those "other things" are truthfully where my priorities rest.

That being said, I'm looking forward to going back to writing some code and building some good products. The meetings and political stuff gets a little old, but I think I'm recharged and motivated to the point that even those won't be able to shake my smile.

We cleaned and organized pretty hard

This was the first day that we really started trying to organize. It's not perfect yet, and maybe it never is, but we got a lot done. The quarter berth is completely squared away, and the starboard sea berth will only have our backpacks in it. We really want to keep as much space open as we can, because a busy boat makes for a busy mind, and would drive us both nuts.

The nav table is completely clean and open, and the boat just became a bit more liveable. I made a crummy little movie that you can watch; it's a 60 second guided tour of our little world.

Having the head in proper working order is really going to make this whole thing complete.

Meet our new stove!

The old stove was kerosene, and probably built around the same time that man first ventured out in canoes from the shorelines of some primitive tribal land. Only two burners of the three worked, and then only one of the remaining two worked, and it was only a matter of time until the last one went away as well.

True, I could have hunted high and low looking for replacement parts, calling people in Akron, Ohio (or wherever), trying to find the one guy who has the one part I need. But it sucked as a stove, Charlotte and I both hated it, and we wanted to get rid of it. The details on why kerosene is so bad is probably understood to every reader of this blog, but essentially it stinks, cooks slow, smokes (generates soot in the cabin), and takes a trained professional to prime and use.

The stove I went with was the Seaward Princess 2 burner gimballed. The measurements looked close to my existing, and I've heard nothing but great reviews of this stove. Here's a link, although I got the 2 burner instead of the three.

So first I had to remove the old stove, which I did by myself, and I don't recommend you try that. It's heavy, sharp, and will trash your bright work on the way out. It's also filthy, which is a reason that after I removed the old stove, I scrubbed the crap out of the stainless firewall that it sits in. It took about an hour just to clean it out, and it was pretty gross. One nice thing about switching out the stove was that the previous owner had a fire onboard it seems. Nothing huge, but they used a dry chemical extinguisher (the correct thing to use), and it caused a really crazy amount of residue that was still falling out even when I threw the thing into the dumpster.

The new stove showed up via UPS, and the driver was nice enough to use his dolly to take the stove all the way down to my boat, where's it's pictured. I ripped the packing material away, and then took the old stove completely out.

Getting the new stove in was a challenge. I lucked out a bit on the gimball blocks, and the width was pretty much right on the money. But the height was off; the new stove was much taller than the old one, and the gimball mounts are higher on the body, so although it fit, it slammed into the firewall and couldn't swing free at all.

I had to call in some backup on this one, and Ryan showed up with his arsenal of wood working tools to help. We figured out that we needed to take the old blocks and carve a groove in them, so they'd fit over the moulding.

After we got the blocks grooved out properly, we dropped the stove in, and it didn't fit so well. So we took the mounts off, and re did it again. If you're planning on replacing a stove, understand right now that you'll probably be getting very comfortable with your gimball mounting blocks. However wide the stove is, there will be gimball posts that stick out a little wider, and your job will be to position some blocks with the exact height and width you need, in the exact position you need them. It's really not that complicated, but it's difficult conditions to work in, and the stove is heavy.

I ran the propane line as well, but I'll make another thread about that, since it's not entirely done yet, and I don't have a lot of good pictures yet.

I haven't filled up the fuel tank, but by all accounts, it should be working like a champ now. One of the nice things with propane is that there are only two ends to the hose run: one at the stove, and one at the tank. Barring those two being screwed up, everything else should be fine.