Last Tuesday after work, Jereme planned on heading down to the boat to install the last 1.5-inch tank fill fitting on our new 90-gallon water tank.
He had been to Home Depot THREE times to find a way to attach the fill hose to the tank using PVC fittings. Finally he went to the local Marine Trading Post trying to find a hose fitting that was barbed on one end (to fit inside the existing hose) and threaded on the other end (to screw onto the fittings on the tank). He found three of them, all the same size but all a litte different, so he bought them all.
Jereme knew it was going to be difficult to insert the barbed fitting end into the hose (since he had recently done the same thing while working on the shower sump removal project). The existing hoses on our boat are metal reinforced hoses that really just don’t stretch. On the shower sump project, Jereme and his buddy Chris tried to use AstroGlide (I know, pretty hilarious right? — two guys just hanging out on a boat using astroglide to fit a hose) and were only able get the hose on about 2 barbs deep out of the 7 barbs in total. Needless to say, Jereme knew he was in for a struggle with the water tank fitting.
As luck would have it, just before Jereme left to head down to the boat, he was leisurely flipping through the latest Cruising World mag and stumpled upon an article about boat hoses.
I kid you not…the EXACT.SAME.HOSE.FITTING.BATTLE he was about to fight that evening was discussed in the very article he had just flipped to. What are the odds?!
The article mentioned how hard it can be to insert these fittings into metal reinforced hoses. Yep! That’s accurate! 😉
The million dollar tip of the day… grab the visible end of the metal wire with pliers and pull out enough of it to make the end of the hose flexible/expandable. Who woulda thought?
So that night, Jereme went down to the boat, grabbed the little metal wire and pulled about a foot of it out the end of the existing hose. He then inserted the fitting and, voila!!! it went in all the way without excessive force or struggle. A couple of stainless steel hose clamps later and the project was complete!
Thank you Cruising World! 🙂