Hunting for Materials

It’s been several days now since we lifted our engine out of the boat and put it on the pontoon next to us. Yet we are still in the process of material hunting. Currently we are shopping for new engine mounts, some SS to modify the current engine bed and after we found out that a new damping plate (between the gearbox and flywheel) plus shipping would cost us some 800 USD, we also added 4 small rubber cones to our list – after all it’s only these small rubber thingies that are broken.

We haven’t had much luck in Kudat so far. Luckily we live in the internet era. We easily found several engine mount dealers, some of them in Asia (mostly based in Singapore) and some in Europe, where we bought engine parts for our Volvo before. However, it seems that we will actually order our new engine mounts from a US internet chandlery go2marine.com. They are relatively cheap and the mounts will be sent by UPS, so could be here within a week or so.

As for the rubber cones for the damping plate, we decided to send them to Taiwan. In Kaohsiung there is an excellent shop where we always bought hoses, gaskets and other rubber materials. They also do custom work and since we have a sample – luckily one of the cones is more or less intact – we hope they would be able to find us the same material and make us new cones.

Now we are searching for some steel to modify our engine bed. In the afternoon we go to a Mr. Chin’s workshop – a local Chinese machinist, who promised to try to find us  some steel angle and also some 316 SS for our new shaft. The advantage with Mr. Chin is that we can speak Chinese to him. Most of the Malays speak some basic English but it’s not enough to discuss technical stuff with them. Hopefully Mr. Chin’s hunt will be successful, otherwise we would have to go to Kota Kinabalu and try our luck there. Which actually is not such a big deal either, since we could also do some provisioning while down there.

Meanwhile the weather is still quite crazy. The constant downpours keep us inside the boat most of the time and so although we are currently trapped in Kudat once again, we console ourselves knowing that even if we could leave, the weather would still keep us right where we are. There are 2 new lows next to the Philippines, one of them was just upgraded to tropical depression and the other one has now 30-50% potential of becoming a significant cyclone. It sure is another rather busy typhoon season in SE Asia…

Current Graphical Analysis of the Weather in the Region