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Gena finished welding back in plates over the cooling system, welded in my stuff, and painted the whole cooling system, radius below waterline area, from frame 8 to frame 3.5.

I battened a base for the pilot house aft bulkhead, cut it out and tacked it in. This way a 4' piece of plate will fit nicely in place as this left a rectangle hole to fill. in the photo to right it's to the left.

Next I cut a small plate to fit in, thus sealing the fore and aft sides of the bulkhead. This piece is actually a shelf above the keel opening aft where some trim ballast will be placed. This means that plate had to be removable.

We used some 1" angle to raise the height of the plate as the prop tube was above the hull level at this point. ( Sorry, no pics of that! ) The whole thing was assembled and nuts welded on, then welded into place.

This way, after the trim has been placed inside, the lid can be bolted down sealed with gasket.

Fun with coal tar!

After all the welding was done, polishing welds and roughing up the plate, coal tar was applied.

Because of the colder temperatures, it went on pretty thick and was very difficult to apply. Gena plans on warming it in the oven next time!

It had been sitting outside in near 0º C temperature. We never really gave it a thought.
The coal tar applied today will likely take 3 or 4 days to become solid enough to walk on.

With coal tar on the cooling system, we feel this will protect and divert any future problems concerning rust of fatigue. From tests we have done, coal tar is quite resistive to high heat, and doesn't crack easily like other epoxies because of the flex it seems to have.

This kind of info is hard to obtain, even from the sales outlet where we purchased it. In fact they didn't seem to know a lot about it.
We did find out that it's okay with diesel fuel though.