Installing a bilge pump 2

From my welding days I have always to work with aluminum. I welded a lot of different material from low grade carbons to stainless and some exotics like titanium. I figured if I was going to keep the weight of this project down aluminum would be the way to go. Another trip to Home Depot produce the material I needed. I has an idea in my head of how I wanted the frame to work, so it was a matter of utilizing the stock on hand at the store. I picked up some 1″ by 1″ and 3/4″ by 3/4″ hollow square tube, 1 1/2″ x 1/8″ flat, 3/4 by 1/8″ flat and 3/4″ x 1/8″ angle. I knew I wanted adjustment back and forth and side to side and the rest could be worked out on paper, and later transferred to Revit (3D Parametric drawing application).

Here’s the raw stock and my chop saw.

This is the best set up for working on inside of your kayak. Simple invert on a few saw houses, I raised the back end and it gave me more movement. I hooked up a shop lamp inside the kayak for light and I finally got some use of my wheelie shop seat.

My welding machine that kept tripping the breaker. Unfortunately the breaker was sized for my MIG welder and this TIG machines came after the supply was installed and it consumes a few more amps.

As with any new architectural project this one started with the existing conditions.

From here I doodled a bit then entered everything into Revit. I wanted to get a idea of what the overall size of the space considering the amount of stuff I was about to cram into it. This reminded me of my last welding job. The company makes chemical separation equipment and generally we needed to get 10 LBS of you know what into a 5LBS bag! This project was going to be the same.

Here’s the space, overall its 11 1/4″ tall and 17 1/2″ wide.

Here’s the pump in the space. Remember all the picture were taken upside down and inverted for this blog, so the pump looks like its floating!

After a few iterations in Revit I settled on the following. The 1″ x squared tube would form the main frame and adjustable legs would stick out from either side. Early on I decided that connecting to the rear of the foot pegs would mean that if I grow 6 or so inches the pump will simply adjust with me! Coming back to reality if a shorter person wanted to try out my boat they can and if they need to pump out they can do that also. Long range thinking was helping to drive this decision and if I even sell the kayak I’ll simply list the pump and an optional extra.

Here’s the final drawing of the pump and frame. I came up with the notion of inserting compression springs in the inner tube that would center the pump between the foot pegs. As the inner tube fit inside the outer tubes and moved freely to allow the pegs to be move forward and aft, the springs would force the pump assembly to center all the time. Yet another trip to the hardware store located the springs and few other odd and ends I needed.

This image shows the pump assembly and foot pegs/rails. As I’m sure you know overkill is my middle name and I don’t recommend you model every nut and bolt when using Revit to design a building, but you can get away with doing so on the project this small.