Not a whole lot going on around here lately. Kids have been hanging out with friends, leaving Ali and I with nothing but boat projects to knock off. Mostly just cleaning and emptying. There is a free table next to the marina office and it’s gotten to the point that if a worker sees me headed in that general direction with anything in my hands they drop what they’re doing and follow. Within thirty seconds, anything set on that table is long gone.

Each engine has a tiny o-ring oil seal located on the throttle arm, and both have been leaking lately. Typical maintenance type thing, but of course it’s never as easy as it should be. I removed the port side assembly easy enough, but didn’t realize when I was doing it that there was a small spring attached to the bolt inside the assembly that would be very, very difficult to get back on if you let it fall off. I let it fall off. I proceeded to spend about four hours in a very uncomfortable position, with a flashlight in my mouth and a needle nose plier in my hand. I don’t remember ever being so happy as I was in the moment that I got it back together. I ran the engine for a while, worked the throttle back and forth, and was oil leak free. Nice.

I briefly contemplated leaving the starboard side alone. It’s only a small oil leak, after all. But I couldn’t do it. I grabbed the socket, gave a good pull, and… snap. The nut had rusted onto the bolt and my Superman strength didn’t even feel it. Well, that’s fun. Especially two days before we’d be motoring over to haul out.

Of course, this is no ordinary nut and bolt. Oh, no. This is a fancy throttle arm doohickey. That indent is where the o-ring goes. And that little hole at the end is where the spring goes. The spring I’d been hoping wouldn’t need to come off on this engine.

I scrambled around asking everyone about a welder. One was out of town. One wasn’t answering his phone. But then somebody mentioned they saw a welder working on someone’s boat down on A dock. I ran down there and caught him just as he was packing up to go home for the day. I showed him the piece, he took it, finished climbing onto his scooter and roared off. He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t even know his name. I had no idea when he might return this crucial item to me.

Yet twenty minutes later he came walking down the dock—a different dock—to Bumfuzzle and handed me the freshly welded bolt. I couldn’t believe it. I asked him how much and he just waved me off. I insisted. He waved me off and walked away. I ran inside and grabbed some money and tried to chase after him, but he was already back to his scooter and waved me off a third time. How awesome is that?

He’s never going to get one of these running that sort of business.

The welding was only half the job, really. The threaded portion of this bolt was also squared off (you can sort of see it in the picture up above). Just to make it as difficult as it could possibly be for me to get fixed. So now I rented a scooter and took off across Langkawi. I’d been told by a worker at the marina that I wanted to go to the machine shop in the blue shed, on the left, about halfway to the town. That’s all I had to go on.

I found it, though, and the guy there was awesome. He took about half an hour shaving miniscule amounts of metal off the bolt until it fit into the other piece just perfectly. Four dollars later (plus five dollars for the scooter rental) I had a bolt that was good as new.

Man, changing an o-ring should never be this difficult.

Meanwhile, Ali was doing this to the boat. Not to worry, we still had about two days left on the boat to finish everything up.

After the long motor up the Malacca Strait it was time for an oil change. One oil filter, fuel filter, impellar, and yes, throttle control o-ring, and each engine was good as new.

Apparently this is all it takes to keep the birds from devouring the rice.