On Board with Mark Corke

Spooners Boat

This is somewhat unusual, it seems that some people will go to great lengths to enjoy a day boating. Enjoy.

    

Broadband radar

 

Simrad have today announced their latest broadband radar offering. Called the 3G it is a true broadband radar which is sure to be a hit with many cruisers who are looking for an affordable easy to read radar that can integrate with other electronics. The screen shot above shows the 3G on the left with the older BR24 on the right, which in itself was very good. You can click the picture to make it bigger but even here you can see that the 3G  has better detail than the older unit and best of all it is also cheaper and is planned to sell for $1700 when it starts shipping in June. I have had the chance to play with some broadband radars this past year and although it is hard to tell here they truly are remarkable, all the more so when you think that only a few years ago radars used huge amounts of power, had a limited range, took at least 10 minutes to warm up before they would transmit, only displayed in monochrome and cost a fortune. Now with these new sets they are becoming available at a price point that makes them attractive to almost everyone and I am seriously thinking of installing one on my new 22 foot center console that I am building. Drawing only 19 watts when transmitting and 2 watts when on standby with an instant power up this new unit is sure to be a big hit with a ton of boaters.

Louis Chemi, COO of Navico Americas had this to say. “We upgraded our award-winning Broadband Radar technology – which already offers best-in-class safety, convenience and short-range capability – and expanded its performance features for even more powerful on-the-water awareness. When released, Broadband 3G will be the most revolutionary radar system available, and we’re offering it at an affordable price point to make it accessible for all boaters.”

  

Above is an image of the radar overlay on a Simrad chart plotter, the red bits are the echos and as you can see they conform perfectly to the outline of the coastline and the other picture is of the radome itself which is very compact and could easily be mounted on a sailboat mast or on a tee top and hardly be noticed.

 

 

Shower pump redux

 

For many years the standard practice for getting rid of grey waste from a shower was to let the water drain into the bilge where it would be picked up by the bilge pump and thus pumped over the side. This works but is far from ideal not least because it is prone to smell and the hair and dirt that is typically dumped into the bilge is want to block up bilge pumps strainers and make them less effective at their primary role which is sucking up bilge water. A galley or heads sink is usually easier to configure because it is often above the waterline, a drain can be led straight from the plug hole to a skin fitting on the top sides of the boat thus no detritus gets into the bilge. But because the shower drain is lower this means that in all but very rare cases the water has to be pumped over the side. Instead of the water into the bilge method the much better course of action is to let the shower drain into a small sump with a integral pump where it can then be pumped up and out through a skin fitting above the waterline in a similar fashion to the drain from the sink mentioned above.

It was only when I was thinking about pumps for the book that I am writing on boat surveying that I came across this pump and drain combo shown above. Called the Gulley IC pump it is a cleaver device that does away with the sump and instead has a pump (the yellow and black thing) connected both electrically and mechanically via a hose to the drain connector (the white thing) which fits into the base of the shower where the more conventional drain would normally be; the two parts can be up to 10 feet away from each other. What makes the whole system cleaver is that a sensor in the drain notes the presence of water and automatically turns on the self priming pump thus sucking the water from the shower. When the water stops it turns off the pump. The whole thing is automatic so there is no switch to turn on and off so guests aboard are not able to leave a switch on, run a pump dry and burn up the pump or an impeller as can be the case with other systems. Apparently is has a soft start and stop function and as it could be mounted some distance from the shower I think that it should be nice and quiet in operation.

 

Gel Coat repair

I recently had an e mail from an On Board reader wanting to know a little about gel coat and how to apply it. Gel Coat is basically a polyester resin that is applied to the inside of the mould onto which subsequent layers of fiberglass mat and resin are added to the required thickness thus building up the hull or other fiberglass part. Gel coat is the part that gives the boat or other moulding the nice shiny finish when it is released from the mould.

The clue is in the name gel coat and for it to cure properly it needs to be sealed off from the outside air. Gel coat if applied to a surface and not covered with another material will remain tacky to the touch, but when used as the external surface of a boat will cure as one side is against the mould and the other is covered with fiberglass and thus both surfaces are sealed from the atmosphere. This explains why when doing a gel coat repair to a boats topsides, (nick,dings and scrapes) it is necessary to cover the surface of the freshly applied gel coat with some plastic or tape; saran wrap is a good choice. With the air thus excluded the gel coat will harden under the tape or saran wrap which can then be removed allowing the resultant surface to be sanded, buffed and waxed to match the surrounding original surface.

 

One way around covering the surface to promote curing is to use a waxed gel coat. The wax rises to the surface and excludes the air thus allowing the gel coat to cure. This product is great way for an owner to coat the insides of lockers, under engines and other areas that may be raw fiberglass which would be otherwise hard to clean. The product shown above works a treat for this but you have to be careful not to try and put too much on at once or it will run and sag, also it has to be applied to a clean dry surface and finally if using more than one coat requires wet sanding between coats both to provide some bite and to remove the wax on the surface.  Of course you do not have to use pre waxed gel coat at all you can just buy regular gel coat then before mixing in the catalyst drop in some wax which is stirred in with a suitable stick. The ratio of wax to gel coat should be in the range of 2% by volume but I have found that dripping in a few drops of candle wax from a melted candle is sufficient for a dixie cup full of gel coat and works a treat.

 

Compression tests

 
One of the old chestnuts that I get asked for over and over again as a surveyor is for a compression test on a gasoline engine. Truth is there are times that a compression test is worthwhile as it can detect problems within an engine and will tell if a particular cylinder is not performing as it should. I carry a compression tester of the type shown above in my truck and how it works is this. Once the engine has been run up to normal operating temperature the spark plugs are removed and the hose for the compression tester is screwed into each plug hole in turn. The engine is then spun over and the reading is recorded and written down for each cylinder. It is basically a comparative test and what we are looking for is a significantly lower reading in one cylinder compared to the others. The reason that it has to be performed on a warm engine is that an engine that is cold will give disproportionate readings which will be higher than a engine which has reached normal operating temperatures. These tests are easy to do and is all fine and dandy on an outboard or an inboard like an atomic 4 where the plugs are easy to get to it becomes more of a problem on a large V 8 engine.

 

 

This is is a prime example of a pair of 525 V8 supercharged mercruisers in a Fountain 38 that are crammed in so tight that the two inboard exhaust risers are almost touching. These engines run hot and getting the spark plugs out after the engines have been run for 30 minutes or so is a job that I do not like to do. Apart from the fact that it is easy to get your hands burned, getting the plugs out is long job that requires the dexterity of a skilled octopus. They are hard to reach, then when you do get them out you have to screw in the compression hose adaptor one cylinder at a time and there are of course 16 chances to burn your fingers even if you can actually reach the plug hole in the first place. It is a long job that takes a great deal of patience and time and is likely to take as long as surveying the rest of the boat combined and the buyer who was requesting the compression test on this particular boat could not understand why I wanted to charge $500 just for comprssion test in addition to the survey fee.

But these engines had just over 100 hours on them which is nothing in terms of their potential life and a compression test was unlikely to reveal anything startling with the engines so new. Think of it this way; a Honda 90 hp outboard uses the same base engine as fitted into the Honda FIT car. If you walked into a car dealership and asked for a compression test the dealer would probably think you nuts. Typically you could easily expect the car to do 150, 000 miles. At an average speed over the life time of the car of say 30 mile per hour that equates to FIVE THOUSAND hours of engine run time so why boat buyers ask routinely for compression checks on engines that are otherwise running fine and have 100 hours on them which is equal for the average motorist of a couple of months driving is beyond me. I have seen commercial boats with these same Honda outboards with 2000 hours on them still going strong.

Incidentally you may be interested to know as a footnote that the engines in the Fountain shown above ran great, when the superchargers really did their stuff as the rev counter reached 3,000 rpm the boat was touching 70 mph and sucking up fuel at the rate of 2 gallons per minute!

 

Hovercraft accident

 

 

I get to survey a lot of boats but rarely get to look at a hover craft which can be registered as a recreational vehicle or a boat. They are pretty rare and are hardly a quiet mode of transport  requiring the use of ear defenders or plugs at all times. The other things that they require at all times are the use of lifejackets for the pilot/helmsman if you will be traveling over water.

Close to were I live is lake Winnpesauke which at this time of year is mostly iced over although by now the ice has at long last started to thaw and therein lies the problem. The ice at this time of year is getting thin and is no longer able to support the weight of a snowmobile or even a person.  This is a problem for some of the year round residents of the islands in the middle of the lake, too much ice for a boat and too little for a snowmobile so they use a small hovercraft like the one shown above. This past weekend there was a tragic accident when a 62 old man died after what appears to be an incident where the skirt of the craft caught on the edge of the ice tipping him into the water. He was not wearing a life jacket. Now this is all supposition and the life jacket may or may not have saved his life but what we do know is that he was conscious when he went into the water as his shouts were heard from the shore, rescuers rushed to his aid and got him to shore. By this time he had stopped breathing and despite the rescuers attempts at CPR he was was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Whether or not a life jacket would have saved his life is open to debate but what is understood is that he had one in the hovercraft but was not wearing it at the time which in a roundabout way brings me back to boat surveying. Of all the boats that I survey nearly all the boats without exception have the life jackets still in their wrappers tucked away in some bilge locker or other such difficult to reach location which leaves me to the conclusion that not only have the people that own the boat never used the life jacket they could not get to it in a panic and would not know how to wear it should the need arise. You can have the best life jacket in the world but it won't save your life if you don't know how to use it and you never wear it.

 

Teak treatments 14 months on

 

Regular readers may think that they have seen this board before and they would be right. It is the weathering board of teak treatments that I have been using for long term tests of various teak oils and other treatments. I initialy put these samples on this board 5 years ago and since that time the samples have been left out to weather.  I have to say that things have not changed that much since I bought you an update way back in January of last year and the findings that I came up with then still hold good. I have reapplied the treatments in accordance with the manufacturers recommendations once per year as written on the can or bottle and it has been a very interesting experience to see how they compare side by side. If you were to look at each one in isolation you can definitely see a difference from plain untreated teak but put them side by side and the difference is marked. Not only is the color different from sample to sample (I should add that the teak all came from the same log and was cut at the same time) but interestingly the grain is raised rather more on some than the others.

You can read the blog posting from a year ago by clicking here and the results as written then still hold up with no revision necessary.