On Board with Mark Corke

LED lights

    Now here is a nifty little tool that I have been having fun with. It's an infrared thermometer that measures temperatures very accurately. I am sure that there are other makes, well I know there are but this one is from Fluke and since borrowing it I have found all sorts of uses for it around the boat. As it is a non contact tool I only have to point it at whatever it is that I want to measure the surface temperature of, pull the trigger and hey presto an instant readout.

    But the point of me telling you all this is that I have had the chance to take accurate readings from the old and new cabin lights fitted to a 38 foot sailboat. It has to be said that the illumination left much to be desired there were many dark spots in the cabin and reading a book or chart was difficult unless you sat directly under one of the original dome lights. As an upgrade we removed the old lights and installed new Imtra Hatteras LED lights. Not only has this provided much needed extra illumination but they also look great. I have been totally sold on the use of LED lights on boats for some time and use them everywhere on my own boats including navigation lights. LED's don't burn out  and use far less electricity than incandescent bulbs.  However one thing that is often overlooked is that they also produce significantly less heat.

Christmas Gold

    Well despite my asking Santa he did not drop a Sabre 42 sedan down my chimney but I got the next best thing a new Flexofold propeller for 'Mallard ' my Golant Gaffer sailboat. Well I don't actually have it yet as I have to spec out the boat but just as soon as I can the order will be placed with my friend Chuck Angle, the Flexofold man in the USA. Then when the new prop arrives I can fit it before the boat goes back into the water come spring.

At present I have a fixed two bladed prop on the boat but although it works great when the boat is under power there is lot of drag when sailing. Five knots is about all that I get from the boat right now and anything that I can do to improve on that has got to be a good thing. The original plan was to fit a folding or feathering prop when I built the boat but by that time I had run out of money so I ended up with the fixed prop that she currently has.

I plan to do some comparative sea trials which I will bring you in due course, in the meantime you can see the same prop that I have shown above in a folded condition by clicking here.

Happy Christmas

Wishing you all peace, joy and love this holiday season.

    ..... and if santa wants to leave me a new Sabre 42 under the tree that would be nice too.

Outboard winterization

    Well I am glad to say that after 10 days without electricity we are finally back into the 21st century. I have a lot of catching up to do, I am behind on my surveying book a little and there are a ton of other jobs that need attention but I have spent the day in the workshop prepping my 2hp outboard for the winter ahead.

    This is a picture of new one, mine is much more ratty than this but it is the same model, a Yamaha 2CMHS. Yamaha do still make this 2 hp two stroke engine but sadly they are no longer available to the US market, however spares are fairly easy to come by which enables me to keep the old girl purring.

    All too often outboards. irrespective of the size are forgotten about at the end of the season, they just get left on the back of a boat or put away in a shed somewhere and then are expected to start some months later when the weather gets warmer. Even if you do your boating in warmer waters where there is no off season a bit of TLC will do wonders for your engine and your temper. Much of this entails putting the engine to bed properly in the winter or storing it sensibly when it is likely to go unused for a period of time.

    Step one is to flush the engine through with fresh water, warm water and aluminum do not sit well together and salt water left in any outboard will lead to corrosion.

    A small engine like my diminutive 20 lb Yamaha will easily run in a trash can full of water but a larger engine can be run on a stand with a set of fresh water muffs feed from a hose pipe. Run the engine until hot then remove it from the water give it a good wipe down and then take it into the garage or whatever to take care of the other tasks. I was especially keen to get indoors because when I took this photo it was 20 degrees with snow on the ground.

You can continue reading by downloading my handy guide here Download PDF outboard

Heaters

   We are still without power at home which by osmosis also means my office and workshops. To make matters worse it snowed heavily last night so I had to dig my way out this morning but at least the exercise warmed me up. Talking of warming me up I wish that I had the Taylor Heater that I had in one of my past boats.

 

Powered by diesel they use next to nothing fuel wise but they warmed the cabin up a treat. Many boaters find this type of heater old school and although not perhaps right for every boat, not least because you need a suitable bulkhead on which to mount them they do work a treat.You also might not need a heater if you only go boating in warm waters or the summer months.

    On all my boats I try to do without propane or gas of any sort, especially after I surveyed a steel boat that literally had the deck peeled back by a gas explosion, sadly killing the couple on board in the process. Gas also has other drawbacks especially up here in the northern latitudes where lower temperatures make gas appliances less efficient but the other drawback is that propane contains a high proportion of moisture. When the cabin is closed up against the cold lighting a gas stove to warm the interior up soon results in a dripping overhead as the already saturated air cannot absorb any more moisture. Problems are exacerbated if you cook with gas too and before long the cabin degenerates into a damp soggy mess. Of course gas has it's place but for me heating with diesel seems like a no brainer, cheaper than gas to operate, significantly less damp problems and I am using a fuel that I have 120 gallons of already under the floor.

    I would love to know other readers thoughts on the best way to heat the boat cabin if you go boating especially when the weather is less than clement.

Inverters and more.

    It's been a few days since I posted anything on this blog but this was not of my own making. I had planned to bring you a series of photographs of how to winterize an outboard but that was before the power went out last Thursday night. Up here in the North East we had a huge ice storm which left more than half a million without power including me. It is only when things like this go wrong that we realize how dependent we all are on electricity. So I am sitting here writing this by the light of a small LED light with my computer plugged into a small inverter.

    This is a small 100 watt Xantrex unit which although I can't power much from it I can at least charge the computer battery and run a few other essentials. To tell the truth I had almost forgotten about it, buried deep within one of the lockers on the boat I had kept it for emergencies aboard should the main inverter/charger fail and I am unable to power up the laptop with the navigational software.
     The limited power means that I have to be very frugal with what and how I use the electricity. The inverter is connected to a couple of 110 amp deep cycle batteries which although they work well enough at powering up the small inverter I have no way of charging them once they are flat, until the power is restored that is. Hopefully the power will be back on very soon and I shall be able to bring you you the planned engine winterization story and step by step photos.

On Board Power

    My wife and I have been casting around for another boat for a while now, we have seen a few we like very much but until we make a final choice I continue to look at some of the equipment that doubtless we will have to install. The stuff that seems to go out of date the fastest is the electronics and it is quite interesting to take a look at even 15 year old boats and notice how far things have progressed in that very short amount of time.

    Unless you really want to rough it a generator seems almost essential for running all those on board systems. Many of the boats that we have looked at have 10KVA generators which will certainly provide power and more for anything that we are ever likely to need but they can be noisy and running a generator of that size simply to charge batteries is very inefficient. I was pondering on this very subject a couple of days ago when today a press release dropped into my in box about this little beastie.

    I have yet to see this in the flesh as it were but basically this could be the answer to my problems.
It's called the Whisper Gen and it's made in New Zealand. At first glance it looks just like a small diesel generator of the Fischer Panda ilk but it is in fact a Stirling engine driving a 800 watt dc generator. That might seem rather small but the manufacturers don't claim this will drive 120 volt appliances directly rather that the generator, working at optimum capacity will charge batteries from which the load is drawn via an inverter. The website gives all the details and the videos on the site provide a good explanation of the technology. What I really like is that when running it is very quiet, weighes only 195 lbs and uses a pint of diesel an hour. Oh and I almost forgot you also get a ton of hot water which you can use for cabin heating or domestic hot water.
More to follow on the Whisper Gen in due course.

   

Epoxy Scales

    I use quite a bit of epoxy one way and another but the only thing is that many jobs only require small amounts. The pumps that come with the epoxy are great at dispensing out the correct proportions but I find that I often end up wasting more than I actually use. Epoxy is expensive stuff so it pays to mix up only what's needed, after all you can always mix more if you run out. I've lost track of the amount of the expensive stuff that I must have thrown away over the years, so with this in mind I decided to do something about it. I made some scales for measuring out a few ounces at a time.

 
    OK they may not be very elegant but these scale do work well and are actually very accurate. Made from some scraps of ply and a short off cut of three eigths bar that I had lying around the workshop they are simple to make, all held together with epoxy......what else!

LED lighting upgrade

This strange looking device might not look much like a light bulb but this Sensibulb from Sailors Solutions is in fact an LED light source.

Whenever a group of cruisers get together invariably the talk will come around to conserving electrical power. When I first starting cruising we had a trailed log and a depth sounder that ran from an internal 9 volt cell. Things have moved on since those days and radar, unheard of on a cruiser in the ‘60s along with a plethora of other electronics are now commonplace. With each piece of new electrical gear that we bolt to our boats our demands on the batteries increase and we either have to increase our capacity for making electricity in the form of generators, solar and wind generators and so on or reduce our consumption.

Rotten to the core!

One of the areas that I look at very carefully when surveying a boat is the integrity of the deck, especially if this contains some core material. There are a ton of good reasons for installing core material, it gives thickness to the deck, provides a measure of sound and thermal insulation and additionally adds stiffness. There are a variety of materials used for cores but far and away the most popular is balsa. Light in weight easy to work and relatively inexpensive it would appear to be the perfect material - until it gets wet. Once water finds its way in the balsa soaks up moisture quickly and if left unchecked rot soon follows which in time can migrate through large areas.
Keeping the balsa cores dry starts at the manufacturing stage and that means that reasonable steps must be taken by the builder to keep water on the outside. Bolts, screws, hatches and anything that penetrates the deck must have a hole that is properly sealed against the ingress of moisture, keeping the water out. Depending on the nature of the deck penetration the methods employed are varied. Where stanchion bases are located for instance the correct approach is to have a solid built up laminate without a core but sadly this is not always done. A solid base makes for a sturdy, safe handrail, the tension on the bolts can't crush a soft core and fractures and failures are minimized.
Even when a builder does the construction of the boat correctly they have no control over later additions undertaken by owners or third party boat yards, alterations which often are the cause of problems. I've often times seen holes drilled through a deck with no sealant, exposed cores and backing plates or washers on the inside that are either too small or non existent. This all sounds like gloom and doom but doing the job properly is not rocket science and will ensure your boat stays sound and dry.  I will be bring you a step-by-step guide in the next day or two on the correct way to install deck hardware but in the meantime I wanted to share a couple of photos with you.

Excuse by shoes in the photo but this boat is about 5 years old, comes from a well respected builder yet had serious water problems with some of the balsa core all the result of an improperly completed vessel. Water had been allowed to get in by creeping past some wood trim had puddled down into the corners of the pilot house roof, a few winters of freeze thaw cycles and the die was cast. The repair yard had to open up areas by cutting off the exterior laminate, scoop out the rotten core then after allowing it to dry, install new core before finally making good the outer laminations, filling, fairing and last but not least spraying on new non skid.

 

This is the side of the wheelhouse which was also saturated necessitating the scooping out of the core to a depth of about 12 inches, the red light is the glow of heat lamp used to dry out the remaining moisture before the balsa is replaced. The cause of this malady was a teak capping with incomplete bedding that was set onto a non sealed edge, this was just asking for trouble. incidentally the capping was screwed on by driving 4 inch wood screws into the balsa. Not only did this fail to hold the trim in place the screws provided a conduit for the water to wick further down into the core material. All this could have been avoided, along with a hefty repair bill had a few simple precautions been taken when the boat was built.

More on core materials in a future posting.