For wont of a screw the day was lost

It's now officially mid-summer and despite the nice weather we still have not had Patrick and Spongebob (the jetskis) in the water. Between baseball, the weather, and lack of preperation we have not been ready.

Today's job was just to get the batteries in. Actually, that wasn't the job until $wife walked past me carrying a battery from the barn while I was comfortably sitting in the sun reading Harry Potter book 6. I said "you could have ASKED me!", but either way that became the focus of the afternoon. The bad news is that I only had 1 set of terminal screws. So one battery went in ok. Then while putting on the air cleaner I noticed/remembered that there appeared to be a problem with the input manifold. It was held on by 1 rather than 2 stainless steel cap head screws (foreshadowing) and the one was loose.

To fully diagnose this I had to remove the air cleaner/flame arrestor. 6 more stainless cap head screws 3 in a difficult location so that I could turn them 0.0000001" at a time. That took probably over 45 min just to get those screws out.

Come to find that there is a 1 1/4" cap head screw just shaking there....it's nut had vibrated free (free range nuts?) and that is part of the reason that the whole assembly was loose. 4:30 PM off to West Marine I go....sadly they don't have what I need. Home Despot has a lot of stainless hardware but nothing close, so SOL on holding the whole thing together, dang it.

Luckily I did get stuff for the battery, only the nut is too wide to fit under the battery terminal. I had to grind that down. I had bought 2 different length bolts. This part may not make sense....the nut goes inside a terminal housing and sits on the top of the battery. The top of the housing has a hole, the cable connector has a hole. So the bolt goes through the cable, through the top of the terminal housing and should engage the nut.

Operative word is "should". The longer bolt will grab the nut, but the bolt bottoms out before the terminal tightens up....garrr. The shorter one will not bottom out BUT is not long enough to grab the nut, it just spins freely! Enter the handyman's special...no not duct tape but close. Toothpicks. Cleverly, I take off the cable and put the short bolt in to grab the nut. Pulling it up I jam toothpics under it, take out the bolt, put on the cable and with the toothpics I have enough clearance to grab the nut with the shorter bolts. Yikes, I've now sweated away 2 gallons of water and I'm insanely covered with grease but both jetskis have turned over. Huzzah!