Replaced my holding tank recently and thought Iwould pass on some lessons learned the hard way for other O'Day owners and maybe some other lines too.
First off I couldn't have done it without the help of Peggy the Head Mistress and her book. There was a strange garlic like odor in the bow and the forward locker was unusable because of it so the hoses had to be replaced and since the tank was old I did not trust it and hoped to increase the capacity at the same time. At Peggy's suggestion I used in the locker. The odor is now gone and we can use the locker again.
Lessons learned
The first pic shows the plywood base that the tank rests on. The original tank outflow was at the bottom aft edge the new tank has two stand pipe outflows at the aft top edge. I assumed that the base was slanted downward on the aft portion, wrong! The tank actually tilts down in the front so I have to go back and figure a way to correct that to drain better to the standpipes.
The second pic shows how I removed the deck discharge hose. The hose stunk because it had a low point where nasty stuff collected. I kept it attached to the tank, cut it high up and capped it off with tape. Thus I was able to remove it with it still attached to the tank and never spilt a drop or suffered a wiff.
The third pic show a failure attaching the Raritan hose to the standpipes. The Raritan hose is great stuff, very easy to route but it has a wire reinforcement that prevents it from stretching. Peggy informed me that the GREY barbed fittings are actually a little oversized (I measured it and she was right as always). I found some WHTE smooth fittings of the same nominal size and they went on very easily.
The last two pics show the new tank in place. The Ronco people were very helpful. I measured carefully and made a cardboard mockup to assure that the larger tank would fit with just a little cutting of the port access opening. Everything fit till I went to reinstall the tray inserts that O'Day uses. As the pics show, they no longer fit as the tank blocks their lower section. They now replace other tray inserts that were cracked. The original tank calculated out to only 11 gals, the new is 17 or 21 gals. Lesson learned, it would have been a lot easier to just keep the original size tank.
Now even after being closed up the boat has no odors. Thank you Peggy!
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