December 2019

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Happy New Year to all our readers.

As the nation prepared for the Christmas activities, the Kerne volunteers allowed themselves something of a breather, without completely taking our eye off the ball.

Whilst the job of thread-cutting and re-gauging the boiler tubeplates is complete, there are other jobs on the boiler to be getting on with. As the corroded bottom section of the smokebox has been cut away, this unsurprisingly revealed that the studs in the boiler shell to which the smokebox is bolted had become ‘necked’. These have now been cut away and will be renewed. The removal of the smokebox section has also given us the opportunity to clean up the face of the boiler where corrosion has built up between the smokebox and boiler shell as well as the areas between the tube holes which, when all the tubes are in situ, are difficult to access. The downside to the removal of the smokebox is that there is now nothing to stand on to reach the upper tube areas, so it is now off planks and platforms. Inevitably, as well as cleaning out the boiler of swarf and debris from the re-threading exercise, there was a lot of muck in the bilges beneath the boiler that has to be removed. Not one of the cleaner jobs, but essential nonetheless.

Above and in the Wheelhouse the angle steel supports for the decking have been fashioned, drilled and bolted into position, awaiting the wooden planks to be cut to size, notched out to clear the support bolts and installed. Further items of wheelhouse equipment have been re-fitted including the GPS antenna, an essential navigational and safety aid in these modern times. In the early days of Kerne’s preservation we had no electronic aids and relied entirely on paper charts, a magnetic compass, a sextant and a VHF radio. How times have changed.

The shift from tube re-threading has given the engineers time to devote to other tasks, so the opportunity has been taken to give our diesel generating set a bit of TLC. This large piece of kit is housed in a steel and aluminium compartment situated directly forward of the Wheelhouse and boiler casing on the port side. The front of the Wheelhouse and boiler casing effectively form the rear of the compartment, so now the wheelhouse is back in position, the small gap between the compartment and the wheelhouse has been re-sealed with a semi-flexible strip to prevent water ingress. New brackets to support the diesel exhaust which runs up the forward port corner of the wheelhouse are being fashioned from stainless steel to prevent future rusting.

The onset of Christmas did provide the crew with an excuse to enjoy some downtime together away from the vessel, and to this end, we convened at our favourite Liverpool hostelry, the Lion Tavern, where a few pints were quaffed and several of the pubs legendary pork pies consumed as we looked forward to 2020 and getting back into steam.

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