When the Cats Away... the mice will do plumbing projects!

I am missing Sheryl as she has flown home for a couple of weeks...

However this also means I can get to a couple of the more disruptive boat jobs. And one of the most disruptive jobs is servicing the heads (that’s toilets and plumbing in land-speak). Not only does plumbing mean I have to open up floorboards and various lockers, find the spare parts and generally make a mess, it also means a certain amount of cursing and blue language as I run into unforeseen problems.

What plumbing job doesn’t involve unforeseen problems? Well we do try our best to foresee difficulties and plan the needed parts.

Todays job involved overhauling the macerator pump...

• spare parts kit for the macerator
• spare macerator
• wiring connectors to wire the new pump in (shown below installed with red shrink tube)

Why have a spare macerator if I also have a spares kit? Well my plan was to be able to quickly disconnect the pipes to the macerator, then just swap in the brand new pump. I have rebuilt these pumps before and I know it will take an hour or so. The plan was to be able to do that rebuild later at my leisure, and put the rebuilt pump back in my spares locker.

It was just as well. The swap went quickly, I added the wiring quick-connectors on the new pump, took out the old pump, fitted the hoses in place and the swap was done in just a few minutes with minimum cursing.

Then I surfaced for air and took the old pump out on deck to rebuild it....

Oops, opening up the old pump I see it has 2 broken bolts in it (out of 4). There are two shorter bolts and 2 longer bolts that hold the motor to the pump assembly. One of those 2 longer bolts is broken, and the spare kit just gives you the 2 shorter bolts. I should have know this since I have used this same pump on Two-Step for years, and those bolts are the main weakness of this pump. Anyway, no excuses, today I pop around to Island Water World to see if they have the bolt studs. Then I can finish the pump rebuild and put it back in my spares kit.

Thank goodness I had the whole spare pump otherwise it would have left an unpleasant mess until the parts could be sorted out.

When the cats away the mice will play (with plumbing parts!)