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Head

Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2017 11:18 pm
by mike cunningham
Well, that was interesting!

Background:
I do not use the head in my Mull 30 . Well, I use it, but I do not use any of the plumbing or the holding tank. Last year I removed the holding tank and most of the hoses and Y valve. I just completed the removal of all the remaining hoses and completed plugging both related through hulls with bronze caps.

I singlehand mostly and I do not like to carry sewage sloshing around in a tank. For many years I have been using "wag bags" which allow me to package waste and store it in an appropriate place on board. There is no flush water involved so the waste is pretty compact.

I generally pee overboard and at sea I use a bucket.

The project:
I use the original Groko head bowl, seat and lid to accommodate the wag bags which fit quite nicely inside the bowl. This works well, but one of the bolted feet on the Groko broke some time ago and needed to be fixed because the bowl would flex around when I sat on it. Need to fix the base.

OK, how do you get the base off? There are four bolts holding it to the floor of the liner in the head. These bolts have nuts on the other end and, guess what, the nuts can't be accessed...at all. Thank God for Amazon is all I can say. I decided to cut a 4 inch access hole in the liner floor so I could get at the bolts. The liner floor is five or six inches raised above the hull itself so it's safe to cut the hole. Once I had a strategy, I ordered the hole cutter and a 4 inch deck plate from Amazon. I cut the hole today and finally got the base off so I can get it into my shop and fix it. Turns out there is a nice little space under the head. Now that I have a deck plate installed in there I can use this space to store items which are important but rarely used. Things like fuel filters come to mind.

The other thing that came out of this was a 4 inch diameter plug of cored head liner. Although Freedom did not provide any way to access the head bolts, they did a beautiful job of fabricating a cored liner. The sample I have in hand looks beautiful 31 years after it was built. Sweet.

Re: Head

Posted: Thu May 31, 2018 10:52 am
by drcscruggs
Nice post as one of the attachment points for my head is also broken and needs replacement. Your post helps me with fixing the problem. Thanks