Nothing can ever possibly top the great Teak Debacle of 2009. As much as we love Evenstar I would sell her before I ever did THAT project again. The crippling pain and the smell and feel of teak caulk in completely inappropriate places is something I do not ever wish to repeat.
The Second Worst Project Ever is the new Autopilot installation. Which is as complete as can be with the boat tied to the dock. After two freaking years of sitting in a box.
What makes this project the Second Worst Ever is not it’s technical difficulty, it’s mess quotient, it’s cost, the amount of labor, the cross disciplinary skills required to execute it, or the difficult to access places that one must contort into. All of these are a factor. But what frosted my cake on this project was it’s seeming simplicity, coupled with my bad judgement that led it to take two years to complete.
The alert reader might remember my rant of two years ago, when I first opened the autopilot box and discovered that although I’d updated my boat with the latest and greatest in technology and boat data systems (in that it only lagged the rest of the electronics world buy a decade or two) I discovered that the very expensive autopilot I had acquired the previous fall in fact was still using a communications technology only marginally better than two tin cans and a string.
I am SO over that.
My problem was one of mistaken assumptions. Some of those mistaken assumptions were, in no particular order…
- A rotary autopilot drive that works with a Raymarine autopilot should work well with a Furuno autopilot too.
- A hydraulic autopilot ram should be able to attach right on the same spot that the old mechanical linear drives did.
- All the various bits of the new system can be screwed to existing surfaces on the boat
- Systems will be well documented and not assume that one is a licensed engineer in the field related to that equipment and “just know” how to do things.
The original thought was that since Evenstar had two existing autopilot systems (older Raymarine systems) with two different types of drives in it I could save some serious money by simply replacing the brains of the system with a new setup, while reusing the existing functional drives.
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| A Raymarine Ram |
For those of you that are not boaters or are not masochists and pay professionals to install things like autpilots – an autopilot system has two major components, and several minor ones. The major components are the “Brain” (also known as the Course Computer, CPU, APU, etc. depending on the brand you buy) and the “Drive” which is a mechanical device controlled by the “Brain” that moves the boat’s rudder. Secondary components include a compass and a device to feed the position of the rudder back to the Brain (called a Rudder Reference Unit). Drives come in a number of types, such as a Ram which is like a piston arm attached to the rudder, a rotary drive installed in the steering system, a chain drive that attaches to the steering system, etc. etc. Drives can be mechanical or use hydraulics.
So I figure I can buy the brains (and compass and RRU) and install those. I figure to put the new autopilot system on the best drive (a “rotary” drive), so I rip out the brain from that drive and sell it on E-Bay, since I will be shortly installing a new brain. The astute reader might remember this was back in 2010.
As it turns out the old rotary drive appears to have two (2) wires that control it, and the Furuno brain does not want to work with a drive of this type. Something to due with clutches and polarity or…something. In the mean time operating on the other autopilot with the linear Ram drives has caused it to seize up and the drives are basically shot. So I make the call that we would be best to keep the other old Raymarine brain and wire it up to the rotary drive, and replace the old ram drive with a new hydraulic system.
The reasons to go hydraulic are mostly to do with the size of the boat. Most “drives” are sold by the size of boat they can handle the loads for, and when you get north of 56,000 pounds your options get severely limited. The old linear drives were a pair of smaller units for 40,000 lb boats and we managed to strip those out, so clearly mechanical wasn’t up to the task for that job. So hydraulic it was, and a pretty big hydraulic setup it would be. My (clearly wrong) thinking on this was that replacing one ram drive with another should be pretty straightforward – you take one out, screw the new one in and go!
Thing I learned about hydraulic rams once I owned one:
- They have a maximum motion range that seems rather less than the old mechanical one I replaced
- They have a pump that must be installed on a horizontal surface (relatively…it is a boat) close by the actual drive arm.
- Hydraulic fluid smells sort of weird and is hard to get off your hands when the boat doesn’t have a commissioned water system
- They need to be bled. Which is sort of nice, because at least something other than me bleeds during one of these projects for a change.
The net result of this was that I very quickly learned that I needed to build a flat spot under my bed on the boat, I needed to get a new spot to attach the ram arm to in order to avoid hyper-extending it and still get full range of rudder motion, and that I didn’t really have the technical skills or tools to make this happen.
To keep you coming back, I’m going to have to leave you with a cliffhanger, because I know you can not take the suspense of not knowing how we got from this:
Be back soon with Part Two!
