Throw the second switch!

On May 22nd, 2008 Published By B.J.

Frederick: It’s not enough. More! More, do you hear me? Throw the third switch!

IGOR: (throwing the switch) Wait till he sees the bill.

It looks like the solar panels have been green-lighted. Of course, both of you that visited here last Monday probably have no clue what I am talking about since I’m fairly sure I’ve never mentioned them except in passing, so I will elaborate.

In brief we’ve decided to put some solar panels on the top of the dodger and on the deck between the dodger and the mast. Using the BP MSX lite panels, I think we can fit a total of about 220-240 watts of panels on those areas without making the boat ugly as sin or hard to move around on. Those are semi-rigid panels, so you can drop things on them or step on them and you don’t have to have a lot of room under them – though they do not produce as much power as the big unattractive rigid units. And you probably won’t even be able to see them unless you are up on the deck or overhead – put an end to unsightly charging lines!

In theory that should be 8-10 Amps (at 24V) hourly when it is bright and sunny…probably less, but we are putting a Blue Sky charge controller in as well. Apparently this does some clever tricks with diodes to reclaim the extra voltage and pump it back into your system for about 10% more power generation. It seems your typical panel makes around 16.8V, and only 14.4V is needed to charge typical batteries. With the clever application of circuitry that extra 1.6 Volts of juice can be sliced out and automagically be bumped up and recombined back into the charging load.

So the theory is with 8-10 Amps/hr we can get somewhere between forty and eighty Amp-hours back so long as it is sunny…maybe more if we are very, very lucky. While that doesn’t keep the generator off completely it will stretch us another day, maybe two in “quiet mode”, at least until we use up the hot water. but I can run the engine for 15-20 minutes to refresh that instead of running the genset for 3-4 hours.

Posted in electricty, projects, solar panels | Comments Off on Throw the second switch!

On the road again…

On May 22nd, 2008 Published By B.J.

Just can’t wait to get on the road again
The life I love is makin’ music with my friends
And I can’t wait to get on the road again
On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
Seein’ things that I may never see again,
And I can’t wait to get on the road again…

Road, water…whatever. Mixing metaphors is something I’ve never shied away from, though to do it with effect is not for the feint of heart.

Evenstar is floating again! Finally, weeks later and longer than expected she is back floating. Tomorrow morning I go to pick up some sails and bring her back home to her mooring.

Of course I am weeks behind where I hoped to be at this point, but in the interval I’ve learned a bunch of great new stuff I can try from my classes. As soon as I get my hands on a couple of torque wrenches and a timing gauge…watch out!

Posted in launches | Comments Off on On the road again…

Reconstruction Begins

On May 6th, 2008 Published By B.J.

Woot woot! The bolts are here, they started putting Evenstar back together today.

Vickie from H-R parts, in the extremely unlikely event that I have a third child I will name it after you, even if it is a boy. You rock.

Posted in broken things, hard to find parts | Comments Off on Reconstruction Begins

A Bolt! A Bolt! My Kingdom for a Bolt

On May 2nd, 2008 Published By B.J.

Well, 12 bolts really.

It seems that the bolts that held the rudder bearing to the rudder post came off rather ugly when the rudder was disassembled.

Apparently they are also very special.

It would seem that a 10mm 1.5 pitch bolt in this particular diameter, size and thread pattern simply does not exist in the United States. Without them the rudder can not go back together, the boat can not get painted and we are stuck on the hard. When speaking with the yard they felt it necessary to order them from Hallberg-Rassy. Unfortunately, Sweden is apparently closed for some national holiday until next week. Visions of my boat spending all of May rudderless and dry have been haunting me for the last two days.

My plan, until about ten minutes ago, was to bring one of the busted bolts over to my friend who owns a machine shop to see if he could make some for me more quickly than I could get a new set from Sweden. He generously offered to help me turn these around quickly if he was capable of doing the machining and getting the stock.

While typing this update I received an e-mail from Vickie at H-R Parts, where she told me that even though she was on vacation she managed to procure the bolts for me (and my head valves) and had already shipped them UPS Express with an expected arrival of next Monday.

Next time I meet the pope I will suggest Vickie for canonization…thank you!!

Posted in cutlass bearing, hard to find parts | Comments Off on A Bolt! A Bolt! My Kingdom for a Bolt

Look Ma! No Rudder!

On Apr 24th, 2008 Published By B.J.

One must take some amusement as this ghastly cutlass bearing project careens out of control. If nothing else, you can REALLY see where the Swedes build a really big, tough boat.

This is a picture of where the rudder used to be. No, that’s not the rudder – it’s just to hang the massive thing off of. Look at the picture in yesterday’s post if that doesn’t make sense. I guess the white part was where the bearing was, you can clearly see where the fiberglass was pulled back to get access to it.

On the plus side, that space between the rudder and the rudder post grew some gnarly barnacles the season before last. The bottom painters missed it and there were barnacles the size of quarters living up in there. Some deft work with a putty knife, a stick, a bit of cloth and some bottom paint cleaned it up, but it’s never really had a goo coat of anti-fouling. So I’ve got that going for me.

Whoop! There it is!
Yes, right there on the ground. I didn’t even try to pick this monster up to see how heavy it was. I suppose I should have maybe put a moose or a small pickup next to it to provide scale.

I’m thinking it might be time to reconsider a change to this blog. I wonder if bustedassboatparts.blogspot.com is take.

Posted in broken things, cutlass bearing, hell | Comments Off on Look Ma! No Rudder!

It Never Ends…

On Apr 23rd, 2008 Published By B.J.

The little joys of boat ownership are without number.

I really DO love boats and owning them, but every now and then something happens that makes you shake your head and wonder just what we are thinking.

This time it is Swedish engineering. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the way the Swedes built my boat. Everything is tough and rugged and strong – well thought out and put together. But sometimes I wish I just had some crappy tub that fell apart when you undid three self tapping screws…easy disassembly. It doesn’t matter what it is, it generally uses more screws and more connectors and is twice as tough to get apart as it seems like it should be. That is a good thing when you are getting the snot pounded out of you off shore; it is a bad thing when you are paying $85/an hour each for two or three guys to scratch their heads trying to figure out how to get your damned prop shaft off.

Yes, the minor cutlass bearing job has taken a turn for the hellish. My original thought and discussion with the yard was that they had a magic Cutlass Bearing Press which I did not, so I could pull the prop and they could roll this thing up and pop out the old bearing and stick in a new one. Quick and painless.

Unless your prop is glassed in by the extra beefy Hallberg-Rassy prop shaft cover ‘o death.

Yes, that large mass of fiberglass negates all the benefits of the Magic Cutlass Bearing Press – it can not be used and the prop shaft must come out, and then the cutlass bearing needs to be chopped up and pulled out in pieces before it can be replaced.

Great…except the prop shaft is too long to fit by the rudder.

Yes, that’s an old picture from the survey and the bottom looks disgusting…but it clearly shows the propeller being quite close to the massive rudder assembly. Needless to say the prop goes a wee bit farther than that gap up into the boat. So the rudder must come off to get the prop shaft out.

But there is another added complication – this boat is so large that the yard can normally only get it about 6-8 inches off the ground in the travel lift. However, if they conveniently take down the massive radar tower on the stern they can hoist it up the necessary three feet or so they need to get the prop down.

That is, if they can get to the screws on the bearing. That great big thing the rudder is stuck too is where the bearing is. Apparently it is all glassed in.

Last time I was by the yard the boys were ripping chunks of fiberglass off of the rudder post to expose the bearings so they could then get the rudder disconnected in order to drop it down. Chunks of fiberglass on the ground, the radar post felled and lying prone on the deck…I just could not watch any more.

Tacking a zero onto the end of the expected cost of a job just makes me happy I am not a teetotaler. Because then it would make me grumpy.

Posted in broken things, cutlass bearing, hell | Comments Off on It Never Ends…

Summer’s Over, Get Back to Work!!

On Apr 18th, 2008 Published By B.J.

Maybe I need to revise my definitions, otherwise with the early morning haul out of Evenstar today we just concluded the shortest summer in recent memory.

This is actually a rather short stay on land while the marina paints the bottom and replaces the cutlass bearing. I bet you don’t remember that last from the “To Do” list do you? Me neither, however I went back and looked at the survey from when we bought her and lo and behold, right there was the “renew cutlass bearing” recommendation. So my job today (hopefully) is to get the prop off so the yard can get their cutlass bearing press over the shaft.

For the not-quite-nautical among my three readers (I flatter myself), the cutlass bearing is a round metal tube that goes around the propeller shaft at the place the propeller shaft enters the boat. When it wears the propeller shaft can start to vibrate. Vibration is bad, as it can lead to fatigue, and fatigue leads to fear and fear leads to suf-fer-ing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Summer’s Over, Get Back to Work!!

Raw Water & Parts Fiascos

On Apr 18th, 2008 Published By B.J.

A small problem noted in a survey a while back has become a large problem through sheer stupidity and ignorance on my part. It was noted when we bought Evenstar that the “Raw Water Pump” was leaking and needed placement or repair. This is something with a lesser capacity for denial would have dealt with immediately; someone like me who recognizes that spewing sea water all over your engine room is an intrinsicly stupid thing to do is still capable of procrastinating long enough to destroy a brand new high output alternator and make a big mess of things.

/* Landlubber mot d’explanation time */
Raw Water Pump – boats like Evenstar use seawater to help cool the engine. While we don’t actually pump sea water through the engine, we do use the sea water (or “Raw Water”) to cool off the engine coolant which then cools the engine much like the coolant system in your car. Only with a boat engine instead of a radiator to cool the coolant you run sea water through a heat exchanger instead. Unlike the front end of your car there’s not a lot of cool breeze in the bowels of the engine room. Inside the pump is a little “impeller” used to suck the water in and push it through the boat; this is made of rubber and wears out from time to time.
/* End of landlubber moment */

Gnawing a hole in the back of my mind since almost day one has been this pump. It’s a fairly simple thing really, and I ordered a replacement some time ago. Easy to order, you call the Volvo parts guy and say “May I have a raw water pump for a Volvo Penta TAMD41 B engine please.” They order it, you fork over around $400 and Bob’s yer uncle Fanny’s yer aunt you have a new pump.

They you look at it, and stare at it. You realize it’s shiny bronze, not Volvo green and you’re going to have to paint it. After you install it. Then you realize every time you open the old pump to change the impeller, an apparently infinite amount of water gushes into the boat. You realize that if you take the pump out when the boat is in the water MANY gallons of water will come in the boat while you futz around dropping screws and O-rings into the bilge trying to put it back on. So you say “it’s OK, it’s be fine until the end of the season.” Or “I’ll get to it in the spring.

Of course sea water is not unlike a mild acid in terms of how it interacts with metal. And electrical things like alternators, well they REALLY don’t like it. So the new high output 24V alternator I paid a lot of money to put in last spring seems to have suffered terminally from my caution. So now it’s critical, because that alternator needs to be replaced and these are items not normally viewed as “disposable”.

Last week, emboldened by my classes in Diesel mechanics and some success taking things apart in the lab I figured it was finally time to replace the pump. I undid the hoses and watched the water gush in. Then, looking at the new pump in one and the old one still attached to the engine I saw that they were not the same.

That’s right folks, the pump is wrong. Not according to the parts book though – the pump in hand is the correct raw water pump for a TAMD41-B engine. It just looks different, and has no extrusions to actually attach the hoses to.

Further research shows that THIS pump expects some sort of adapter things. So I order them. $58.00 later I am the proud owner of five O-Rings, two plastic clips and two small bolts. The total mass of this including the bolts can not be more than two ounces of material. What seems to be missing though is the “adapter” I thought I was ordering in order to get the hoses onto the pump. Turns out there isn’t one…THIS pump expects pipes, not hoses. So it’s pretty useless to me without re-plumbing the engine or cutting segments of my hose and installing pipes. If one of these fittings goes I have a one inch hose in my engine room quietly siphoning seawater in to the boat at an alarming rate. This could easily sink the boat every quickly, so I can not mess around here.

So it’s back to square one, with a a $400 bronze paperweight and some really expensive rubber bands.

Posted in broken things | Comments Off on Raw Water & Parts Fiascos

It’s Officially Summer!

On Apr 17th, 2008 Published By B.J.

Well, not in the formal sense. But it’s always been my opinion that it’s summer “as long as the boat’s in the water.” Since we wet stored this year I had to amend that a bit to mean “as long as the boat is uncovered.”

Well, the shrink wrap came off today and we are now past the day when the insurance company says we need to be laid up. So…it’s summer. Now we just wait for the weather to realize it and deal with people thinking we’re odd for wearing shorts when it’s 50 degrees.

Posted in haulouts, launches | Comments Off on It’s Officially Summer!

It could be a lot worse

On Mar 13th, 2008 Published By B.J.


Well, as proof of concepts go it was painful but worth while. I’ve almost finished my tiny little section of teak re-caulking. Two small panels on either side of the wheel in the cockpit and the driver’s seat were the targets. Easy to work on…and usually covered by cushions.

Re-caulking teak is a hideous, awful job. Getting the teak out is painstaking. Using a Fein Multimaster with a special teak blade helps, but that doesn’t really get the very small and fine pieces of old caulk out. And you need to get every little scrap of caulk out.

So the next step is to go back with a 1/8th inch chisel, some small picks, razors, and hobby knives to get every little scrap of caulk out. A bright light is helpful to show you how much you missed right after you think you are done. I am temped to get reading glasses to magnify the work area for the next time.

Once you have the caulk as out as it will get then you sand the grooves and clean them with acetone. At this point if you are patient (which I am not) you can mask all of the teak off. Or you could just mask the corners and edges where the Evil Caulk will get on the boat.

The caulk is nasty stuff. It’s worse than the gook that drowned all the mammoths in LaBrea; in fact when I’d finished caulking it looked like one of those mammoths had crawled out of the tar pits and through my cockpit. It’s thick, it’s sticky, it’s impossible to get out of your skin and it happily sticks to anything it can. It also cures permanently; if your snazzy caulk gun blows the back off a tube of caulk you can count on it being permanently cured into one piece where the caulk got sucked back into the gears.

The trick with the caulk is to FILL the grooves and keep it moving at just the right speed. Then you run over the top of it with a putty knife to scrape off the excess so you can get it all over your hands, your pants, your tools and the rest of the boat. Once the caulk is applied you need to let it cure for a couple of days.

The final step is to sand. The sanding is cut down if you take a sharp chisel and run it through your thumbs so you bleed profusely. Actually what you are supposes to do is lightly slice off the excess caulk from the top of the wood so you have less sanding to do. You are supposed to do this without gouging the wood, though your thumb is OK so long as you can avoid bleeding all over the teak.

The final results? Not bad for my first attempt. It’s not totally done, but I’ve completed enough to show that I can do it without completely screwing the job up. Of course, I’ve also demonstrated that I think I can spend two to four hours per day working on this job and never finish it since the teak will be ready to re-caulk by the time I get back to where I started.

If you look closely you can see where I failed to fill all the seams, and where I got a little to excited with the Fein Multimaster.

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Posted in foul black sticky stuff, hell, Teak | Comments Off on It could be a lot worse