I spent more time then I should have today working on the boat. When I put it in the water, the temp keeps slowly climbing. I am baffled by this as when I use a hose, it doesn't do this.

I found out that there is not a thermostat in the engine, so I'll have to order a new one.

I decided to go ahead and take it out on the lake, so with my neighbor following me on his boat, Broderick and I took it out.

I was hoping that when moving in the water, the extra water pressure would help push through the engine to keep it cooler. Well, for the most part, it worked. The engine stayed at 180F which is still too warm, but not dangerous.

Broderick and I make 1 1/2 laps around the lake when the freeze plugs on the other side of the engine popped out and started leaking water like crazy. So Mark had to pull us back in.

Overall, the boat road really well in the water though!!!

Earlier this year I bought a boat off of ebay. It was one of those Boat Angels auctions where people donate the boat and all proceeds go to the charity. Well, I bid $150 thinking there was no way I would ever win it and guess what.. I won it.

It's a 1977 18' Bonanza OMC 175 HP with a Ford 302 engine.

So, suddenly I had to explain to Holly why I bought this thing and what we were going to do with it. Obviously, for $150, it was pretty rough, but I started to work on it.

Here are pictures!

This is a really abridged description of everything I've done. A lot of trial and error and I decided to just mentioned what worked instead of all the things that didn't. :)

The first thing I did was change the oil... I figured if there was water or something in the oil, then no reason to go any further. Surprisingly, everything looked great.

At first, I couldn't get it to crank over, and replaced the starter solenoid and it turned over like a dream. But, it wouldn't fire.

So, I pulled the wire between the coil and the distributor cap (randomizer) and the end was bad... New set of plug wires and plugs and the engine fired right up.

The next thing was to replace (or put together) the lower unit. Buying a rebuilt lower unit is about $800, which is more then I wanted (or could) spend.. so I put out an ad on Craig's list and found the entire outdrive for $100. Good thing I did, because my upper unit was bad as well (seals pretty much gone).

Putting everything back together, I found some stripped screws, so I had to drill them out, put in a liner, and replace.. so that was working.

I also discovered during this process that the boot around the intermediary housing was bad, luckily that unit I bought for $100 came with a basically new boot, so problem solved.

The only real way to test this is to stick the butt of the boat in the water and see what happens. I found a water leak around the housing (I hadn't tightened the band holding the boot tightly enough) and the engine was running hot, but the biggest problem was water pouring out of the engine. Looking, I could see that a freeze plug had popped out. And of course, the one that popped out was behind something nearly impossible to get at, without taking the whole engine out. :(

My little bilge pump could barely keep up with all the water coming in... so good thing I left it on the trailer.

So, I brought the boat back up the house, tightened up the band and started messing with the plug. I couldn't pull the old one out, but I could stick a screw driver in, so I pried it back into place.

Also, I put in a new toggle switch for the gears (That's why the previous owner had ripped apart the lower unit as it stopped shifting... turns out the switch went bad).

So, I just stuck the boat back into the water and all of my water leaks are fixed!! So close!! Unfortunately, the engine is still running hot, so I think I need to rip apart the water pump.. I'll do some more testing first as some of the ports on the pump are capped off, this might be effecting the water flow and causing the problem.

There are two pumps on it.. 1 pulls in water from the lake and the other circulates around the engine. so I have to figure out which one is bad.


Update!

I was reading the manual tonight and learned normal operating temperature is about 180F. The temp gauge shows 140 in the middle and it goes up to about 210... so 180 looks pretty high. Long story short, I shut off the engine before it ever got up that high, so everything might be working just fine. I'll try it again tomorrow!!

First of all, Holly and I are going to make a commitment to start blogging again. With facebook, it is very easy to forget about blogging as we put in daily status updates and such (now, if there was some way to pull those into a daily post!!). :)

We had our Beaver Lake community garage sale this morning, which turned out to be a huge success. We were worried as we had storms last night, but by 8 AM, everything was cleared out. We made some money, but more importantly, we got rid of a bunch of stuff! Now, we just need to sort through the garage again and put what's left into various storage areas (attic, closets, etc) and maybe I'll be able to park my car in the garage finally!! :)

We stopped selling around 2:30 and drove into town for the Taste of Omaha. Man, sooo many people. We had a good time and the kids rode a few rides. I was disappointed as the food was pretty expensive and rather then being able to "taste" different restaurants, you got enough food from each for a whole meal. I would have rather received much smaller portions so we could have tried more places. :(

There is also a sand building contest at the Quest center, so we checked that out on the way home and took some pics that I'll upload eventually. Pretty neat though, some amazing talent in the area.

Julia had her 6 month check-up this week and boy is she growing!!!

She is 95% in both height and weight, at 27" and 18 lbs 1 oz.

I've uploaded quite a few pics of Julia and I'll be adding to these regularly. Having some down time in the hospital was nice as I took the time to update past pictures and upload new ones (well over 600 added/categorized).

Julia is home and doing really well, all the kids love having her around although, all she does right now is eat/sleep and cry. :)

Lucy gets pretty upset when we try to put Julia down (which we rarely do since she wakes up almost as soon as we do).

Holly and I are trying to sleep in shifts, and Holly sleeps during the day when she can. Her recovery from the c-section has been amazing and she came home from the hospital after just 2 days.

Julia was born this morning at 9:09 AM. She weighs 9lbs and 2 oz and is 21 inches long!

I'll be uploading lots of pictures over the next couple of days.

Everyone is doing well!

Well, I have been horrible about keeping things up to date on my website and I am not even going to try to catch up with everything, although, I am going to try to keep things a little more current moving forward.

The big news is that tomorrow, my 4th little one is due. We go in at 6:45 AM for an 8:30 AM C-Section.

I'll be posting a lot more details and sending people emails, at least those emails that I have!

I'll also be posting information to Facebook, so if I haven't added you as a friend, you should put in the request now!