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Mr. Geeeeeeeeeeeeee is in the House!

by Wayne | May 6, 2018 | The Gardner, Wayne | 39 comments

One of the many unique things about our new boat Möbius, and perhaps one that will raise the most eyebrows is our choice of the main, and only, engine. I’ll probably make it a whole new post, possibly several to explain all that is behind this decision and for now just give you a relatively quick overview of the whole journey this engine has taken from Canterbury England where we first “adopted him” to his arrival here at Naval Yachts last week.

We affectionately refer to our big beautiful engine as “Mr. G” because it is a Gardner 6LXB. For you fellow engine aficionados and gearheads out there, yes THAT Gardner. The L. Gardner and Sons Ltd. to be precise. If you click on that link or this Wikipedia entry you will get a short history of the Gardner company and the diesel engines the produced for almost ONE HUNDRED years. In 1892, German scientist and inventor Rudolf Diesel invented what is referred to as a “compression-ignition engine” as it used the heat created by compressing the air inside a cylinder to ignite and burn the fuel he also invented that bears his name. So when I say that Gardner engines have a long history having produced their first diesel engine in 1903, I am not being the least bit hyperbolic. Just for a change.

I’ll do my best not to bore you with a full history but just to put them into some perspective here are some snippets about the company. L Gardner & Son of Patricroft in Manchester for many years, were the world export leaders in diesel engines for commercial use all around the globe. Throughout the 50s 60s & 70s, most of the British made trucks and buses relied on Gardner power, and they were certainly engines of legend. In the latter part of the company history, Brothers Hugh & John Gardner designed some of the longest lasting and fuel efficient commercial diesels of the 20th century, a huge proportion of their output is still in daily use. In the 1960’s it was estimated that 83.3% of all fishing vessels built in the UK were powered by Gardners and as much as 45% of the Gardner’s produced went into fishing boats and 59% of these went overseas markets. I can attest to this as I used to teach Auto Mechanics in a fishing town of Ladner British Columbia and while I don’t know exact numbers there were a lot of these fish boats my student’s families fished on that were powered by Gardners. Gardner’s were also specified by the Royal National Lifeboat Institute RNLI for all their boats. So while not the only application, Gardners are very much marine engines.

Skipping over the reasons why for just now, I started my search for a Gardner almost exactly two years ago today and after much research I decided that the Gardner 6LXB engine would be the just right Goldilocks engine for Möbius. These LX series of engines were first designed and tested by Hugh& John Gardner in April 1958 making this their 60th “birthday”. The 6LXB model line was introduced in 1966 and was produced through 1979. Mr. G. is engine #196071 made in February 1975 and put into service in a barge working on the River Thames. In 2015 this ship was renovated and converted to a tug which required a larger 8LXB engine so they removed the 6LXB and traded it in for a new 8LXB and which is how we came to find it at Gardner Marine Diesels Ltd in Canterbury, Kent England. Gardner Marine is the current incarnation of the original Gardner company now run by an amazing fellow, Michael Harrison who I was most fortunate to have been in contact with via Email at just the right time. What I was looking for was a completely original and intact 6LXB as I wanted to do the full restoration and in our initial Emails Michael was hesitant to provide one as they normally only sell “factory new” fully rebuilt engines all over the world. After many Emails back where I explained my rather unique situation and request Michael relented and promised to keep his eyes open for the just right engine for us.

You can therefore imagine my delight when I received this message from Michael:

From: Michael Harrison @ Gardner Marine
Sent: July 10, 2017 11:14 AM
To: wayne.christine@mobius.world
Subject: Re: Looking for a Gardner 6LXB to restore

Good morning Wayne, Many thanks for your email and welcome back to Europe!

Well, I have good news. We ended up purchasing two engines the other day, out of the three, and one is perfect for you, I believe. I did not want to say anything until they were physically here as we often buy engines that come up under par.

However, this is a genuine marine 6LXB engine, with the following equipment/specification:
– Late type crankcase
– Late type cylinder heads with decompression
– Gardner oil cooler with all original copper pipework
– Gardner marine header tank and thermostat housing arrangement
– Genuine marine inlet manifold and inlet trunk
– Genuine marine exhaust manifold and outlet elbow
– Additional original Gardner pipework for oil gauges
– Rear well marine aluminium sump and all original copper connections to and from
– Standard marine extended crankshaft, with original aluminium pulley
– Original cast front engine feet
– Marine fuel pump, which is free and running (it was a running take out)
– Auxiliary oil pump for oil cooling with original copper pipework.

At the time, Christine and I were house/pet sitting for some very dear friends in Albufeira Portugal so I quickly arranged some flights to go meet with Michael in Canterbury and check out the engine and the company in person. Michael is a fantastic fellow and his Dad had worked for the original L. Gardner & Sons company most of his life before the company went through some restructuring and take overs by other companies. Michael and his Dad bought what was left of the company, all their inventory and most of their machinery and while they don’t do the foundry work of casting engine blocks and such so no truly new Gardner engines are made any longer, they do continue to make all the other parts needed to fully rebuild and restore most any of the Gardner models and that is the business which Michael now runs.

Here is my first meeting of Mr. G and Michael Harrison at Gardner Marine on July 14, 2017

I know this will not look like much to many of you but to me this was love at first sight.

EXACTLY what I had been hoping to find.

It was a marine version 6LXB, completely original and intact and Michael is able to provide me with a full set of brand new parts from pistons and rings to bearings, gaskets, pumps and the like.

My long time friend and fellow car nut Robin, arms folded in the back, lives outside of London and he was kind enough to come pick me up at the airport and we drove out to Canterbury to spend the day with Michael touring the whole Gardner company and peppering him with unending questions. Michael can answer every question there is having not only literally grown up with these at his Dad’s side but also because he does or supervises the hundreds of restorations of Gardners and often accompanies them for the installation in places all over the world.

Quickly realising that Robin and I were deeply into all this, Michael gave us an incredibly thorough tour of every part of their restoration shop, all the original machines they are still using as well as the new ones they have built or added.

In the foreground here is a fully restored 6LXB which Gardner Marine had just finished rebuilding back to factory specs. This is what Mr. G will look like in a few months.

For some scale, that little fellow in the back is a different model Gardner. an 8 cylinder 8LB3 that is about to go back to its home in a large fish boat in Singapore.

Here is a shot of the other side of this 6LXB from a bit closer in and show you what a work of art and engineering these engines are.

To those of us who are into such things, these are like meticulously made mechanical marvels.

However these are not only beautiful, they are true work horses.

This is the performance chart for our 6LXB which graphs the real BHP, Torque and fuel consumption curves. It may not make much sense to many of you but what this shows is a very low revving engine which develops its Horse Power very steadily as shown in that almost vertical line sloping up and to the right.

Even more importantly for our use is that incredibly flat torque curve putting out 536 foot pounds in the configuration we will set up.

Best of all and in keeping with our emphasis on efficiency for all aspects of Möbius is the equally flat and low fuel curves at the bottom. This engine has a thermal efficiency of just a touch over 40% which is almost unheard of even today. I will get into all these performance details in a separate post for those who are interested in such things but what we can all understand is the following:

* The HP and Torque curves cross over at 1300 RPM which would be not much off idle for most modern diesel engines so this is a very low revving and long lasting engine.

* Gobs of torque at all revs from idle upwards which is what we need to slowly turn our 1m / 39.5” diameter CPP 4 bladed propeller with more “grunt” than we will ever need.

* Fuel efficiency which could very well help us set records for how little energy is required to move our equally efficient hull at 10+ knots all day and all night on passages around the world.

* Fewest possible moving parts, no turbo, no electronics, heck other than the starter no electrics!

and saving the best for last, Christine’s favorite feature: if needed these engines can be hand cranked to start!!!

OK, OK, enough already Wayne! I’ll get into all this much more in a future post for those of you who would like to know more.

Michael and his crew soon had Mr. G all strapped down and plastic wrapped for the next part of the journey which took Mr. G from Canterbury to Albufeira Portugal where I could work on it for the next few months before we headed off to Antalya.

So a few weeks later this truck backed into the place we were staying in Albufeira (thanks John & Michelle!!) and with the help of a very powerful hydraulic tailgate was soon on the ground and into the makeshift car port I created.

Mr. G could meet his new Mum and Dad.

Call it silly if you like but we are VERY proud and happy parents!

We literally put our life into Mr. G’s hands, or perhaps better said Mr. G’s reliability and torque and my hands, and we know that the G in Mr. G is not just for Gardner, it is also for Goldilocks as we are certain this is just the right engine for us.

The other half pallet you might have noticed in the truck is the box of all the parts required for the full rebuild.

How do you know when you’ve found your Goldilocks Girl? When she gets as excited as you about unpacking a box of engine parts!

Over the next few weeks I completely dismantled the whole engine, cleaned everything thoroughly and began the restoration by pressing in new cylinder liners, grinding the cylinder head & block, installing new valves and seats and so on.
Off with the heads…………….
Which promptly headed off to the local machine ship for new valves and seats.

Next off was the cast iron cylinder case which also went off to the machine shop to press out the old cylinder liners and press in the new ones. It is because of this kind of construction where the cylinders are “sleeved” and can have these liners replaced with new ones that this possible to truly bring these engines back to factory new specifications.

I will cary a full engine rebuild kit of parts onboard just in case of the extremely unlikely failure of any of these massive parts given the remoteness of most of our anchorages but I fully expect to have these new parts go to the next owner in 50 years or so.

Had to buy a hydraulic lift to be able to get some of these parts off.

Dropped the tiny little oil pan to get the pistons, rods and crankshaft out.

The oil pan and crankcase are both cast aluminum and the pan alone weighs almost 100 pounds.

Total engine weight, dry no oil or water, no flywheel,

is about 2300 lbs / 1044 Kg

Pistons all out
ready to go to the machine shop.

Crankshaft still like new

Cylinder block back from the machine shop nicely ground on top, new liners inside and ready for assembly

Reversing the process now, reassembling to get ready to ship to Antalya.

Parts are just dry assembled for shipping and will all come apart again in Antalya for further cleaning, painting, polishing and final assembly.

All together and strapped in along with the hydraulic hoist

Plastic wrapped to keep him all clean and dry and Mr. G is ready for the next leg of the journey being trucked to Antalya.

Arriving at the entrance to the Free Zone in Antalya last week, April 27, 2018

A quick forklift ride and ……….
Mr. G is in the House!!

This will be his new home in the workshop GreeNaval has kindly provided right next to where the hull is being built and I’ve not got my work cut out for me disassembling him, lots of spit and polish and then back together he goes all ready for lifting into the completed hull in a few months.

Piles of Aluminium: Update week of April 30–May 4, 2018

by Wayne | May 5, 2018 | Boat building, Hull | 0 comments

The changes this week may not be as visually obvious from the progress on PGL (Project GoldiLocks) this first week of May 2018 but it was a very productive week none the less. This was our 2nd four day work week in a row as May 1st is Labor Day in Turkey and the EU countries. The most visible progress you’ll see in the pictures below is the separation of the thousands of individual pieces from the AL plates that we covered in last week’s update. Less visible is that the deck plating has now been tack welded in place on the jig as this is readied to soon receive all the vertical transverse frames or ribs as you might think of them, along with the longitudinal running stringers which run underneath the deck plate. I’ll let the photos below do most of the talking and there is also a set of video clips compiled into a summary of the week at the end.

Hope you enjoy this latest update and if you have not already done so, consider putting your Email address into the “Subscribe” box up in the top right corner here so you will receive these update posts automatically. Even more importantly to us, please add your comments, questions and suggestions in the comments section at the end of this and every posting.

Let’s start by zooming in on two of the aft deck plates to show how edges of AL plate that will be butt welded need to be beveled like this. It is a simple manual process done with a grinder and these 45 degree bevels form a nice deep V groove where the weld will go and enables full penetration of the weld for maximum strength.

If you look closely at the plates in this and the photo below you will see the reference line which has been etched 20mm in from the outer the sides of the deck plates. These are used to help line up each plate and then be used to help trim these edges into the long sweeping curves of the deck before the hull plates go on.

On plate this thin (5mm) it is arguably unnecessary to put these grooves in so they are relatively minor here but on the thicker plate it is very important to ensure complete penetration of the welds on both sides.

As the hull is initially built upside down, the surfaces you see here are the undersides of the deck plate so these will form the “ceiling” of the spaces below. None of these surfaces will be visible once the boat is built because all surfaces will be heavily insulated with various thicknesses of EPDM rubber. EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) is a type of closed cell synthetic rubber with excellent insulation properties, zero water vapor absorption, 0.2% water absorption, highly UV resistant and odorless. and is that black spongy feeling closed cell rubber foam you may have seen this material surrounding hot water pipes refrigeration systems.. We will use EPDM around hot and cold pipes as well but we will mostly use it for creating a hull that is like a Thermos bottle; completely insulated against hot and cold.

These underside welds will be left as is and the welds on top of the deck we walk on will be ground flush.

Remember those piles of AL that used to look like this?

and this…..

Now they look like this……..

and this…….

and this

and this,

It may look a bit chaotic but there is a method to this madness as the parts have been sorted into piles with a common purpose or location to make it easier to find as the assembly begins.

Each part requires some amount of preparation for assembly and welding from smoothing off the tabs that held the parts into he plate for shipping or rounding over edges where pipes and wires will pass through or putting on those bevels we saw on the deck plates earlier in this post.

You can also see quite clearly in this picture that any areas which are going to be welded have been lightly ground to remove the layer of hard aluminium oxide that naturally forms on bare AL plate. You can see the clear contrast of the darker and duller AL oxide and the brighter silvery areas that are fresh aluminium. The oxide layer can interfere with getting good clean welds and hence the removal. But over time all the surfaces will have their protective hard oxide coating and blend together into the beauty that bare aluminum has, at least to my eyes.

This is the inevitable scrap AL left over when all the individual parts are removed from the 6m x 2m AL plates they were cut from. Once all the parts are removed and all the scrap is left it will be sent back to the AL supplier to be melted down and rolled into all new panels for someone else’s boat.

One of the major features of building from aluminium I appreciate is that it is perhaps the most recyclable of all materials. In the case of aluminum cans for example, every gram or ounce you put in the recycle bin gets recycled and ends up back on a store shelf in just 60 days. . Recycling of aluminum cans saves 95% of the energy required to make the same amount of aluminum from its virgin source. One ton of recycled aluminum saves 14,000 kilowatt hours (Kwh) of energy, 40 barrels of oil, 152 million BTU’s of energy, and 10 cubic yards of landfill space.

And so we also have a growing modern art sculpture forming outside, which has grown from this …………………

…………… to this so far.

it doesn’t get talked about too much but it is a growing problem figuring out what to do with FRP or fiberglass boats that are scrapped and even more so with the newer composites such as Carbon fiber and Kevlar. I read that there are inroads being made to cut these up into small pieces and be able to recycle some of them but it is currently very labour intensive and expensive process.

No coincidence then that Baris and Dincer named this company and shipyard GreeNaval! I come back to the many other ways we have focused on maximising the efficient use of energy overall in not only the building of Möbius and this new line of eXpedition Passage Maker or XPM boats, but also with optimised efficiency after being launched.
The more significant change this week though is that the construction phase of the hull has truly begun now with the deck plates being tack welded to the jig in preparation for the individual deck panels to be fully welded together.

The layout is based on the centerline and here you see Enver, the Master Welder in the foreground with the laser sight line tool in the middle of the aft deck area from which reference marks are then put on the jig and deck plates to line them up with this center line or CL.

This is Uğur in the foreground, our main man on the workshop floor, using the red line projected by the laser to precisely mark where the CL of the very aft end of the deck lies.

Up on the front deck it is the same procedure of working from the CL out to accurately line up where to plates butt together and to precisely position them on the jig.

Using the reference marks and the jig the deck plates are pressed down firmly against those concave curved edges of the jig underneath and then tack welded together so the deck plates accurately follow the curve of the jig edges which were precisely CNC cut from the data in the 3D model.

Here you see Uğur providing more than enough weight to push the 5mm deck plates against the jig while another one of the welders is underneath tack welding the deck plate where he is standing to the jig.

Once all the deck plates are all tacked in just the right position the transverse seams where the individual plates butt together will be welded together which takes us full circle from the V grooves we saw at the beginning of this post.

With the deck plates tacked in place this shot looking across the aft deck to what will be the aft Starboard (right) corner, you can how the plates have again been lightly ground to remove that oxide layer wherever welds will go.

The transverse (side to side) lines you see here are where there is either a seam where two plates will be welded together or where the edge of one of the vertical frames will be welded to the deck plate. The longitudinal or lengthwise ground lines are where those stringers we have talked about so much in previous posts will be welded to the deck plate. You can appreciate how this grid of vertical AL components will make this a very rigid deck and boat.

And one last indication of the progress this week, these “Weapons of Mass CONstruction” have been brought into our bay ready for the action they will soon see in assembling and building the hull. These are now sitting where that big stack of AL plates sat just a few days ago, so as you can see, another very productive week thanks to the great crew here at GreeNaval Yachts and all the members of Team Goldilocks.

Stay tuned for more folks, we’ve only just begun!

As always, here is a video compilation of clips I shot through the week to give you another perspective of the work. A bit longer but some of you have been asking for more details so here you go.

Thanks for joining us on this adventure, hope you are enjoying it as much as we are. Wouldn’t be the same without you.

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Mr. Geeeeeeeeeeeeee is in the House!

Piles of Aluminium: Update week of April 30–May 4, 2018

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