Tuesday, May 23, 2017

outboards and John Muir...

A bit of copyright hi-jinks, a question of some import, and this sure smells fishy...

So, the outboard motor now starts on the first pull, shifts gears without issues, and purrs like a kitten.

Me, well my back has issues, I have a finger that may be broken, and enough stress points to qualify for a pre-existing conditions refusal of insurance. Is working on your boats propulsion system not a fun and frolicsome grand endeavour?

Still, to be truthful, the satisfaction of bringing an engine back from the dead really is kinda nice. Something you might want to remember is that working on your own boat and its systems is not just about saving some money.

In the process of the two-hour-job-that took-three-days debacle I kept wishing that the late but still great John Muir had written a book about outboard repair...

Fact is, I have three books on outboard motor repair and none of them really touched on the how-to of the various issues that needed fixing or gave me the insight to sort out a fix on my own. That works out to nearly $75 bucks of paper taking up space on my book shelves that should be able to pull their weight but just don't seem to.

The words "pretty much useless" do come to mind though...

What did help was the voice in my head telling me how would John Muir might approach the current problems and what would he do to fix it.



The thing is, I realize that I tend to use the John Muir internal voice in my head for just about everything requiring the process of making complicated problems doable. It pops up when I'm doing rigging, building a guitar/surfboard/boat, and, lately, when trying to sort out the current political clusterfuck that is life in the year 2017.

Which is why I often suggest that folks with boats should buy an old used 70's vintage copy of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive" by John Muir and read it. It's really just a way to do things rather than a book about fixing a VW.


Listening to Ozomatli

So it goes...