For those keeping score at home, earlier entries are here and here. With some help from a friend, I got my Simpson-Lawrence (Lewmar) Sprint 400 anchor windlass removed from the foredeck of Two Lucky Fish. It wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared it would be, but it was very helpful having another set of hands along.

If nothing else, somebody could take pictures of me working!

Once the windlass was removed, it was time to clean up the deck. To start with, I removed as much of the old bedding compound as I could using “mechanical” means. The best tool, it turned out, was an improvised tool: a sheet of some scrap plastic I had picked up at TAP Plastics for another project. I’d brought this along to cushion the foredeck while we used  various levers and a small pry-bar to gently lift up the windlass body WITHOUT damaging the surface of the deck. It worked well in that role, and then came in handy again for the clean up, too:

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In case you don’t remember, I took my Simpson-Lawrence (Lewmar) Sprint 400 anchor windlass apart last week, in hopes of improving its sluggish performance.

First, here’s a picture of me reassembling it:

Oh, sorry…wrong photo. See, I felt a little like Scotty in the Jefferies Tube every time I slid up into the forepeak on my back. Here I am:

So I put it all back together, and…it didn’t work any better. Actually, I think it was worse. But now I’m not sure there was really anything wrong with the electric motor (or the current flow through it) to begin with.

See, part of the compound gear assembly is broken, and I didn’t realize it until now. That just MIGHT have something to do with the sluggish, gutless performance I’m seeing. Maybe the motor’s working fine, but it’s encountering SEVERE resistance because of one or more failures within the gear case. Hmmmm…

So here’s the lower part of the gear case, showing one end of the part I know is broken. The gear in the upper right is reverse-threaded onto a shaft. In the picture on the right I’ve removed the gear. The threaded shaft is broken. It’s difficult to tell with grease all over the place, I realize.

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Actually, “Hella” is the manufacturer’s name; Hella Marine, to be precise. But I tell ya, these kids today, with their hulahoops and their dungarees and their hip, cool “hella” slang…it’s impossible for me to resist temptation.
 
So I say these new Hella Thinlite LED Strip Lamps are “hella cool”. At just over 3/8″ (10 mm, to be precise), the Thinlite LED Strip Lamps from Hella Marine delivers dependable, low-current-draw illumination in a low-profile surface mount design suitable for interior and exterior applications. Here’s the lowdown…

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Is “overhaul” quite the right term? I’m not sure. Anyway, the anchor windlass was not working properly, so I took it apart, cleaned it up, and put it back together again.

I was playing with it because I wanted to see how well or poorly my new Rocna 6-kg anchor would self-deploy off my current bow-roller. Here is the anchor and windlass on Two Lucky Fish’s foredeck, complete with my shiny new do-it-yourself custom-fabricated bail:

The windlass appears to be a Simpson-Lawrence (now Lewmar) Sprint 400, and it was not actuating reliably in either direction, and even when it would run, it was gutless, unable to lift much of anything at all.

My theory was that it was not getting all the current through it, so I decided to open it up and take a look. Yuck!

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These little doo-dads are great! They’re smaller and cheaper than the adhesive-backed alternative. The down-side, of course, is that you have to supply the adhesive, and you have to let that cure before you can use them.

The Weld-Mount people want you to use their epoxy, and I would guess that it probably works fine. I wouldn’t know, though, because I still have about half a tube of BoatLife Life Calk polysulfide to use up. So I used that, and it appears to be holding well. It’s only been a couple of weeks, though…I’ll report back if and when they fail!

As usual, I picked these up at Fisheries Supply. Here’s the cable from my new VHF antenna entering through the cabin top. It’s attached to the Weld-Mount wire-tie anchor with a plain old "zip-tie".

No, there’s no sealant on the inside of this hole. You don’t seal the inside, because if water gets through whatever gasket/sealant you used on the outside, you want to SEE that water in the boat. You don’t want it to soak into the fiberglass for a few years before you discover that the outer seal has failed. I learned that from Navagear Publisher Aaron.

Here’s a product I’ve been meaning to write about for awhile: the Solar Stik, a robust solar panel mounting system for cruising boats and other applications. The advantages of solar are compelling: less reliance on fossil fuels; less wear and tear on engines being run to generate electricity; quiet and non-polluting energy; and the simplicity of no moving parts. However, panels that produce useful amounts of power need to be pretty big, and deck space is often limited on cruising boats. In Mexico, I’ve seen panels mounted in all kinds of inventive, sometimes precarious ways. The better ones are on arches, hard-top biminis, or davits, where they are generally up and out of the way. Others are cantilevered off of lifelines or held in a spider web of rigging. And some are custom folding brackets that allow panels to be turned toward the sun for maximum power output. The Solar Stik folks have taken the specially designed bracket approach to a new, and welcome height.

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When I bought my cruising cat a few years back, the un-loved, raw-water cooled 18hp Volvo diesels were one of my biggest concerns, and I set aside some cash for new diesels and saildrives. As luck would have it, I found a couple new, still-in-their-crates, 27hp Yanmar diesels with matching saildrives, being sold by an inventor who decided he’d rather not build his own catamaran. Since then, the crates have been sitting in my shop waiting for the old Volvos to give up their places. But, lately, I’ve been thinking seriously about going diesel/electric hybrid instead.

Electric drives for sailboats have been gaining noticeable momentum in the last few years, and it no longer seems to be such a bleeding edge proposition. Here are some of the systems I know about:

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I just recently ran across another online retailer specializing in useful and innovative products for cruisers, and they’ve got some interesting stuff. Here are some of the things that caught my eye: (more…)

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Hey, so, I’m excited about this. We found Carl of the C-Dory 25, Gigi, locally, and he has a Torqeedo Travel 801 folding electric outboard, and he agreed to have us do a video feature on it. So, we met him down at the marina in Edmonds, WA, where we took the Torqeedo out of its bag, put it together, and tried it out.
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Walking by an Aqualarm display at Strictly Sail, a cellphone-based emergency alert system that ties into your boat’s systems caught my eye. I’ve seen some other devices and services that provide some similar functionality, e.g. the sophisticated SeaKey system that uses a two-way satellite connection to monitor your boat’s position and systems. The Aqualarm is a simpler system that’s relatively affordable. A small black box can monitor most any circuit that has a two conductor, closure switch, such as a bilge water detector, smoke or fire alarm, intrusion alarm, etc. It also has a low battery voltage alarm, and can detect excessive bilge pump cycling. When an event is detected, you receive a cellphone text message alerting you to the problem. Best of all, the $15/month flat fee for the monitoring service is pretty reasonable. If you are away from your moored or docked boat a lot of the time and want some peace-of-mind, this system seems like a pretty good value. Prices with various sensor options range from about $750 to $1,200.

Aqualarm has a whole range of safety-oriented sensors and alarms. After an unfortunate experience with a plugged exhaust manifold and a ruptured exhaust hose on an inboard-outboard motorboat a few weeks ago, I have a heightened interest in the raw water flow and exhaust hose temperature sensors. I bet a large proportion of Aqualarm’s sales come after a scary and/or expensive event on board! Their products seem to be fairly priced and good quality, and not overly high tech. Worth a look.