Stuck in KK, doing boat jobs, “Kathy goes home”

Yss, Kathy is back in the UK visiting family, and I’m doing messy boat jobs, but more of that later. Before Kathy left we had a few meals out, I particularly liked the big covered Chinese food court / Hawker market we stumbled on. It’s a huge area, with stalls all around the perimeter.

In the middle of all the tables there is a stage. Now often on the stage they have bands and karaoke sessions, but I was delighted to see some traditional dance and yelping being performed.

Later there was some flame throwing / fire eating stuff.

We were invited up on stage, but I didn’t fancy it, you can imagine I had to grab Kathy to stop her jumping up to join in the traditional dance routines they were teaching.
But enough frivolity, let’s get down to the main business of the day, the heater. It seems odd to be working on the heater here, but we will need it later in the year when we close in on Vancouver / Washington, in September or later. We hate being cold, and when your clothes are damp and you have to do a watch in the rain, it’s just plain miserable. also this is my last chance to work on the heating system, where I am able to import replacement parts easily. I can have stuff shipped here Duty Free on export and Duty Free on import, which helps the coffers a bit. I understand this is costly and difficult to do in the Philippines, and I don’t fancy trying it in Japan either.
The heater we have is a diesel Eberspacher from Germany, it heats water which it pumps around radiators. It’s a neat efficient little system, but ours is very old and probably hasn’t worked for many years, possibly ten. So I stripped it down to try and find out why it wouldn’t start. As you can see from the pic’s it was quite a mess, closer inspection, with the assistance of many youtube videos, revealed that the internal air intake fan was seized, also the cabling for one of the temperature sensors has shed it’s insulation and was shorted. Also the exhaust was blocked with decomposing exhaust outlet pipe. The gaskets on the main heater chamber had perished, I was able to replace these with ones I cut out from some gasket material I brought out. 

As it turned out, I was able to clean it up quite well, and re-assembled it and fired it up. It took awhile for the fuel to get there from the tank, but once the pipe was full and fuel flowed, she fired up and ran very nicely. Hot water was soon reaching the two radiators in the main cabin. These have computer fans behind them which push the air out, this doesn’t seem like a lot to me, but I can’t tell, as they don’t work. There’s no power reaching the fans, but this will be trivial, probably just a case of me reconnecting the wires I pulled out 2 years ago as I had no idea what they did or where they went!.

This one’s for Kathy, expect it’s much the same in Swindon 😉

We had a last visit to the Imago mall a few days ago, and another dance troupe, almost identical to the one in the food court were performing. It was odd seeing this in a shopping mall, but I did enjoy it.

Today I went hardware shopping and was delighted to find all the various oddball bits I was looking for.
It will be fun playing with these honkers, I’m expecting lots of fog when we leave Japan, so they might come in useful, only £6, and they only have to last 6 months.

This is another filter, all part of making the water onboard nice and safe to drink.

Finally when I left Kathy at the airport in KK, I had a wander, and they had a display of lots of pictures of the town and surrounding country, laid out in a before and after style, usually pictures before the concrete, and then after. Without exception, every ‘before’ picture was lovely, old wooden houses, river boats, long houses etc, and all the afters were concrete blocks. I think it was meant to show how much the town has moved on in just a few decades, interesting how this ‘progress’ appears so different to a tourist.
However one picture really caught my attention, it was the town a few years ago, where the reefs are very clear. You can’t see these from the shore, but I often see waves breaking and know something is there, we also saw a fishing vessel aground on one of these the other day. I was thinking of taking the boat through here, but won’t bother now.

Paul Collister