Episode 45 Electrifying Sandpiper Part 1

Sandpiper came without electrics (not counting the battery-operated cabin lights). There are good reasons for this, other than keeping the price down. There is less to go wrong, and there is a lot of fun to be had on boats without electrics. People have been sailing boats for millennia before the likes of Willam Gilbert and Sir Thomas Browne discovered magnetism and electricity in the 17th Century. (Benjamin Franklin’s later experiment with a kite in a thunderstorm seems to have been embellished, which would have helped his political ambitions). 

Also, there is a lot you can do with small battery-powered bits and bobs. The cabin lights have been mentioned. I now have a battery-powered radio. Other owners use battery-powered outboard motors. But, the list is limited. What about a depth-sounder/fish finder (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or an auto-helm (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or the occasional trip with a portable fridge (like the one sitting in my caravan)? Or some electric pumps to pump out the ballast, or to pump freshwater to the tap? True, these latter items are on the nice-to-have rather than must-have list, but the list could expand endlessly with an electrified boat. There are also good reasons to install electrics.

Like other Cygnet owners, I have thought long and hard on this topic. The very last thing I intend to do is to drill a hole in my shiny new boat, which is exactly what I would need to do to install cables tidily. My strategy, then, is to put off this fateful day as humanly possible, if ever I were to change my mind. I need to develop the electrics in a reversible way, being as unintrusive as possible. Further, the Admiral would never forgive me for making some horrible alterations to the pristine Sandpiper (and she has first-hand experience of my capabilities in this regard).

The strategy I have decided upon is to make a demountable plywood base plate that could be bolted and unbolted from the starboard bulkhead (the wall between the cabin and cockpit on the right hand side). 

But, how can you fix bolts to the bulkhead without drilling holes? I’m glad you asked. The answer is to use stainless steel tee-nuts glued to the bulkhead. They are small and don’t need holes. The worst that would happen, with this approach, is that I would be left with the tee -bolts glued to the bulkhead.

The first challenge, then, was what glue to use. I could have used epoxy resin, thickened with a filler to make a gooey paste. Epoxy resin does not flow fast, but it does flow far. I wondered if the epoxy resin would form dribbles and snots on the bulkhead, which leant at an overhanging angle of about 10 degrees and seemed perfectly oriented to create these unwanted features. Also, I only wanted a small amount, probably less than the smallest cans of resin and hardener. After staring at the big shelf of Sika products in the Bug Green Shed for fifteen minutes or so, I decided to buy a tube of Sikabond 145 Supergrip, which promised to glue anything to anything with a rigid bond. I did not want something that would flex and creep.

Before taking the glue anywhere near the boat, I gave it a trial. Not having a suitable piece of fibreglass to hand, I glued a tee-nut to an aluminium square tube, after roughing the surfaces with an angle grinder. I hung some weights off it, using plastic bottles filled with water for the weights; 1 litre being 1 kilogram. 

On my first attempt, I found that the glue had not set in the centre of the tee nut. It seems the Sikabond 145 cures with exposure to the atmosphere, like Superglue and other C3 glues. As the stainless steel of the tee-nut and the alumium proxy for the fibre-glass formed perfectly hermetical seals, the centre of the glue blob took longer to cure than the rim. I tried again and waited three days instead of one.

This time, the glue blob had set, so I started attaching weights, working all the way up to 11kg (I ran out of plastic bottles and buckets) and then left it. A week later, I was pleased to see the assembly still holding the weight with no sign of sagging or creeping. The glue worked as I had hoped.

The next step was to cut a plywood plate to shape. I used a tick-stick on a piece of cardboard salvaged from the greengrocer’s bin and worked on a blank. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could cut the bulkhead plate and the battery tray (more on this later) from a single piece of 6mm plywood that I bought, again, from the Big Green Shed. With a little trimming and shaping, I formed the plate to fit snugly onto the bulkhead with its port side tucked beneath the companionway trim.

I drilled holes into the plywood baseplate where I wanted the tee-nuts so I could use the baseplate to hold the nuts in position as the glue cured. I had to invent some Heath-Robinson struts to push the baseplate against the bulkhead, using some scrap strips of ply and an extendable broom-handle.

With a wire brush, I scuffed the spots of the bulkhead where the tee-nuts would go. I stuck packing tape to the plywood to de-bond the cured glue, applied my blobs to the tee-nuts and set the thing in place to cure overnight. I did not want to leave it until the glue had set completely, as it might have bonded something to something else more permanently than intended.

I was a little too hasty in removing it the following morning. I had not covered the whole surface of the plywood with packing tape, so wherever the glue touched the plywood, it set. The glue also did not fully set between the tee-nuts and bulkhead, causing some tear-out on the rear face of the plate. The overall effect was that the glue had fully set where I did not want it to set, and it had not set where I wanted it to set, causing me to knock the tee-nuts out of alignment. 

I decided to nudge the tee-nuts back into alignment, only to find the glue setting as soon as I moved them. Thankfully, I got everything back to where it needed to be. After re-assembling my Heath-Robinson struts, I left it, again. A week later, I took off the baseplate and found the tee-nuts solidly set in place, needing some trimming of excess glue.

The bolts were made from cut-down button-head bolts from the local nut and bolt shop. A tip for cutting down bolts with a hand-held hacksaw is to fit a nut between the cut and the bolt head. This provides a flat, adjustable surface to cut against, protects the thread you want to keep, and helps knock off the inevitable burrs when you unwind the nut. If you have ever attempted to thread a nut onto a cut bolt, you will know the fiddly nuisance those burrs can be.

Finally, in this episode, I roughed up the sides of the boxes that I will fit onto the plywood baseplate and bolted the assembly in place. If it survived the road trip to the boat club, and a Sunday afternoon race, it would probably last a while. Thankfully, it did. 

Now, the magic of my demountable system truly starts. I took the baseplate home to work on it further whilst leaving the boat in its parking-bay at the club.

Carboard mock-up made from a mango box

Testing how well the glue holds the tee-nut

Battery tray and bulkhead baseplate, cut to size

Holding the base plate in position while the glue sets

Tee-nuts glued in position on the bulkhead

One of the glued-on tee-nuts

A cut-down holding bolt with its washers

Roughed up assembly bolted onto the bulkhead

Episode 44 LROCP AMSA MMSI ICOM M94DE

This jumble of letters and numbers can be explained by my decision to get a radio for my boat. To the uninitiated, the process is as complex as making sense of all these letters and numbers.

Let me start with the legalities. In Queensland, it is illegal to operate a VHF radio without a license. For safety reasons, however, the Water Police would rather see Moreton Bay filled with unlicensed boaties with VHF radios than unlicensed boaties without them. So, the law is rarely enforced. 

Apart from legalities, another good reason to get a license (properly, a Certificate of Proficiency) is to get a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) code, which is free and is administered in Australia by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). Your MMSI inducts you into the world of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Digital Selective Calling (DSC). When combined with your coordinates from a GPS-enabled device, the MMSI can be used to send distress messages with the push of a button. If there is one lesson I have learned about sailing, it is that things can go to custard very quicky, and they often do it all at the same time. The prospect of hitting a distress button, rather than going through the rigmarole of a Mayday call including knowing and relating your latitude and longitude when everything is going wrong all at once, is irresistible. 

In 2016, long before I knew much about MMSIs and GPS, I attended a day-course that qualified me for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Long-Range Operator Certificate of Proficiency (LROCP). At the time, it was useful for my volunteering efforts with Sails at Bayside, as I could (legally) operate a VHF radio for the day’s activities.

The course taught me some useful fundamentals; for example VHF works (almost) on line-of-sight, thus limiting its range.  The course also taught me some other interesting, but less useful things; for example, methodologies to measure the specific gravity of sulfuric acid in a lead-acid battery using a hydrometer. I am sure this latter technique was widely used by U-Boats in WW2 but I cannot see myself drilling holes into the sealed batteries of today’s world to insert a free-floating hydrometer to find out what remaining charge they might hold. Also, what about lithium-iron-phosphate batteries? A colleague who volunteers with Marine Rescue told me that as radios are electrical devices, the course designers needed to include something of an electrical nature, hence the inclusion of WW2-era battery technology. Maybe it tells us something about the median age of the people who designed the course, but I digress.

I sold my previous VHF radio with Bolero, my previous boat, so I was in want of a radio and in need of a new one. I knew this day would come, but I had been putting if off trusting in the law that says electronic gear doubles in power and halves in price every 18 months or so.

My new boat, Sandpiper, did not have a radio. It did not even have batteries. I was hoping to find a hand-held self-powered unit that had GPS (for position) and AIS (for distress calls). The reputed quality of the brand was important. I settled on the ICOM M94DE. The fact that it had DSC was a bonus. It even had some rudimentary navigation capabilities in that it could point you to preset waypoints. Whitworths had one in stock that, at $499, was $6 cheaper than the best offer on-line, so I set about buying it.

Actually buying it involved some to-and-fro. Whitworths advised me to get an MMSI before buying the radio because you only get one opportunity to code in the MMSI. This might seem draconian, but it prevents the MMSI system, which is run out of Geneva, from getting clogged up with spurious MMSIs. It also discourages theft.

However, when I started my on-line application for an MMSI, it asked for the serial number of the radio. As I did not yet have the radio, I could not complete the application. I called AMSA who reassured me that there was no other reason for me to not get an MMSI, but it might take up to two weeks. I also called ICOM who reassured me that if I stuffed up the MMSI, I could send the unit back to the manufacturer to get the wrong MMSI erased. I then bought the radio from Whitworths and entered the serial number into my MMSI application. I was pleasantly surprised to find the MMSI in my email the following morning and, with my wife keeping careful watch over my shoulder, entered it into the radio, finally connecting all the dots, letters, and numbers.

Before taking it out, or even entering the MMSI, I had to charge the battery. In its first charge, the screen showed a “charging” icon, but gave no indication of progress. This might be because it had not been booted up, did not know its MMSI, did not know what a full charge looked like, etc. I simply left it for  a few hours and returned to a blank screen. Trying the "on" button, proved productive, as it actually turned on. Once set up, the screen showed how full the battery was (without the use of a hydrometer, I hasten to add), GPS position and, when I had typed it in, the MMSI. Incidentally, ICOM told me that I could have used the unit as a MMSI-less VHF radio by pressing the clear (CLR) button when it asked for one. The written instructions in the manual were obtuse on this important point.

On my first outing this week, I found that the radio worked as advertised, but it needed some adjustment.

As noted earlier, VHF works (almost) by line-of-sight. Because of this, I could not contact Volunteer Marine Rescue (VMR) Raby Bay from Manly Marina. There was some higher ground in-between. I had to get to the eastern side of Green Island to talk to VMR Raby Bay. It was reassuring to do a radio check, even though my transmission was weak. It is also worth remembering the line-of-sight nature of VHF when put the radio down, somewhere handy. Leaving the radio on a seat or on the floor lowers its visibility and limits its ability to receive. I found a useful function for the belt clip by clipping the radio onto the handle of the sliding companionway hatch, which was as high as I could get it without holding it up in the air. 

An alternative was to get a fixed radio with an aerial. However, there are no obvious out-of-the-way places to mount the aerial, and it would also need a house battery and full electrics, which the boat did not have. The cost of the fixed radio plus aerial would have been close to the cost of my hand-held radio, not counting the installation of the electrics.

Another issue was that I had not yet dialed in the collision alarm properly. The collision alarm goes off when another AIS-equipped vessel will enter the prescribed radius for closest point of approach (CPA) or time to CPA (TCPA). My alarm went off almost continuously, which was maddening. It went off in Manly Marina, likely because some of the moored boats had their AIS turned on. It went off whenever another boat was travelling parallel to mine, even though it was 1.5nm (about 2km) away). More than once, I wished I had my binoculars so that I could find the converging boat in an apparently empty bay. High on the list of priorities when I got home was to dial in a smaller radius for CPA, a smaller time for TCPA and something called Slow Warn, which is described in the manual with the same lack of clarity as the opportunities to code in the MMSI.

Overall, my VHF radio gives me confidence that it will do what it needs to do when everything else is turning turtle (it is worth mentioning at this point that the radio is waterproof, and it floats and flashes when dropped in the water). My next road test might be a Sunday-afternoon race. 

Radio clipped onto handle of companionway hatch cover

Episode 43: Small things that make big differences

Today was my second trip as a solo sailor. I hasten to add that I hope others will join me, but I would rather reduce the number of witnesses to the obligatory rookie mistakes in my early trips. 

Last Sunday, I poked my nose out of Manly Harbour, saw the dark rain band approaching and decided to head back rather than trying to find clear skies on the other side. This proved to be a wise move as the clear skies did not arrive until about Tuesday. Today I got the sails up, with a single reef in the main, and ventured as far as Green Island. The wind then veered south and decided to get boisterous. Thanking my single reef, I furled the jib, turned tail and scurried back to Manly harbour at a fair clip.

Heading out today, I found the boat easy to sail. The Cygnet 20 has less gear than my other boats; no winches, no travelers, not even a backstay. To tack, you simply push the tiller away, let go of the job on one side and bring it in on the other, whilst simultaneously regaining control of the tiller. The fewer adjustments might leave you behind a more tune-able boat but, as the boat trotted along at about 6 knots today, it did not seem to miss all the fandangles of my previous boats.

Last Sunday, I found some of those little things that made a big difference. I accidentally lodged the safety circlip under the mast as I stepped it. The mast of the Cygnet 20 is mounted in a tabernacle on the cabin roof with a hinge about eight inches above the roof. This arrangement stops the mast squashing the gaff and boom against the cabin roof when it is lowered, and it reduces the mechanical effort to lift the mast. When raised, there is a half-inch safety pin that goes through holes in the base of the tabernacle and a corresponding hole in the mast. Normally, it is a snug fit. This time, it jammed. I mistakenly thought it was because it was a new boat, so I persuaded the safety pin through the holes by tapping it with a pair of pliers (not having a hammer handy). When it came to putting the safety circlip into the safety pin, I realized my mistake – the circlip was jammed under the mast, pushing it upwards so that the safety pin obstinately resisted my attempts to insert it. I had to borrow a proper hammer and drift to get the safety pin out again so that I could re-lower the mast, retrieve the circlip, re-step the mast, re-insert the safety pin (it went in much more easily, this time), and fit the circlip. The photo below shows the tabernacle with the safety pin inserted from the left and it is almost hidden. If you squint hard enough, you might just be able to make out the tiny circlip on the bottom right of the tabernacle, where it should be. Such a small thing took about half an hour to put right.

Bungs. Always check that you have screwed them in before launching. I launched today before I had screwed them in. I remembered just as I was maneuvering the boat off the trailer. It only cost me about 10 minutes to get the boat back on the trailer so I could pull it up the ramp, screw the bungs in and relaunch. 

A four-step step ladder saves heaps of energy and time. With a trailer sailer, the time and energy spent launching and retrieving can be measured by the number of times you climb on and off the boat on its trailer. Not having the climbing agility of an African leopard or a gibbon, I have found the ladder invaluable. It also enables me to reach the top of the mast, when it is lowered, to fit the covers.

Incidentally, I received a couple of compliments on having the best covers in the fleet. I ordered them with the boat, and Tim the Trimmer did a truly excellent job. I must have been in my teens when I learned the value of good covers. I was playing guitar in various youth groups and bands and always coveted the better instruments. One of my guitars was a cheap Spanish, and as it slid off my shoulders, onto the back wheel of my push-bike and onto the road with a sickening twanging noise, I came to the realization that even the nicer guitars get pounded when they don’t have good covers or cases. Ever since, I have learned to reduce the budget for the instrument so that I could afford a hard case, and so preserve the paintwork and varnish. The boat was a huge step up in budget from my early guitars, but the principle of good covers remained. Hopefully, they will protect the boat from the Queensland sun. I had wondered if the additional $5000 or so was worth it, but I don’t doubt it now. They fit like a glove, and they are much, much easier and quicker to fit than the rubbishy tarps on my previous boats. Less time and energy wrangling covers means more time and energy on the water. Maybe we can count the covers as a not-a-small thing, but they make a big difference.

In future, I hope to take my wife out. And, maybe, our new dog, Bea, who is a Golden Retriever, now 20 weeks old and teething. My favorite photo of her is shown below. She will not go out on the water until she improves her body coordination.

Sandpiper's tablernacle, seen from the front. The tiny circlip is at the base of the mast on the right

Single reef outbound from Manly

Sandpiper's fabulous covers

Bea learning where the ground is

Episode 42 Naming and Launching Sandpiper, my new Cygnet 20

 It has been a long wait, about 18 months since I paid my deposit to Blue Water Cruising Yachts. The build started in September, due for completion before Christmas, but problems with getting the trailer certified pushed delivery back to January. In late January, I drove from Brisbane to Newcastle  and hauled the boat back. On the journey, some folks complimented me on such a handsome boat. How did it go, they asked. About 95 km/hr, I said as it sat on its trailer at a roadside stop.

Unrelated to the boat, except as a means to haul it, I found something about my Ford Territory that I did not know before. It seems a certain tyre mart with Mart and T and Jane and Bob in its brand name, did not know it either. When replacing the tyres on an all-wheel-drive, make sure they are the same brand. Not just the same type, but exactly the same brand. I had arranged for said tyre mart to replace two of my tyres with the same tyres I already had. Something went wrong in the booking and when I turned up on the Saturday, they said they didn't have them. No problem, they said, we will just fit these more expensive tyres to the front and leave the 3-month-old good ones on the rear. When I drove off, there was a thudding that felt like I was hitting a speed hump every second or so. So, instead of leaving on the Sunday, I drove home and returned the car to the tyre mart on Monday morning. The tyre mart checked everything but could not find the problem. Satisfied that my wheels would not actually fall off on the 1700 km round trip, I ventured forth and found that I could avoid the thudding if I abstained from cruise control. I got back safely, with the boat, and asked Moreton Bay Ford to diagnose the problem. A big shout to Moreton Bay Ford for looking at the problem and diagnosing the power distribution was the problem - the different brand tyres were tracking just differently enough to trigger an attempted power distribution, hence the intermittent thudding. The tyre mart swapped out the "wrong" tyres and the thudding stopped.

My experience of registering the boat and trailer in Queensland is best described as a necessary evil. I don't envy the clerk as he tapped various numbers and codes into the computer, but it was a tedious 60-minute wait to get charged the registration fees of $513. And, this was after I had to pay a Queensland inspector $220 for a trailer safety certificate and HAVRAS because the NSW certification did not count. Obviously, what is safe on the roads in NSW is not safe in QLD. That, or the bureaucrats found another way to justify their jobs. With the registration, I could tow the boat from my home to the Wynnum Manly Yacht club, where its parking spot was waiting.

Launch day was fun, if I draw a discrete blank over my attempts to get the mast up in the morning. A few friends and family joined us at the Wynnum Manly Boat ramp as the Reverend Jim Stonier blessed the boat, and my wife named it. I named it Sandpiper, after the Mirror dinghy that I had build with my dad as a teenager. That boat finally fell to pieces, and I kept one of the gudgeons as a memento. This boat was of a far superior quality. After the formalities, I took some of the guests and their kids on a brief circuit in the marina. In launching and retrieving I made the obligatory rookie errors, but I am glad to report that no one actually died.

Naming the boat

First launch into Moreton Bay

Episode 41 Tallying up the costs

How much does it cost to own a boat?

The question is often asked by folks interested in buying a boat, but not having any experience of owning one. It is, of course, impossible to answer definitively, but it is possible to conjure up a working budget. This post is intended for the prospective boat-buyer as he or she ponders the possibility buying and maintaining a first boat.

My limited experience tells me that the more expensive unknowns are not what many prospective boat-owners think. The costs van vary widely, depending on whether the thing that is bought is really appropriate for the task that it is bought for. Also, it really helps if you know who to turn to to get what you need, be it someone who can do boat electrics, or someone who knows how to service marine diesel engines. The mounting costs of these two issues alone prompted me to part ways with Bolero, but a more experienced or connected owner might have successfully rescued the situation for fewer dollars (and I truly hope that was the case with Bolero’s new owner). 

The harsh reality is that boats do indeed reach the end of their serviceable lives and it is worth lodging the fact immovably in one’s field of view when presented with a seemingly irresistible deal on an old boat. End-of-life occurs in a kind of mythical parallel time-space continuum that has some vague connection to the one inhabited by our boats. Theoretically, it occurs when the work required greatly outweighs the value of the boat but it commonly gets shunted back into its parallel universe by as much sentiment as much as putting the old family dog to sleep. 

Many GRP boats are now 30 to 40 years old. Contrary to the promises of vendors and agents, they are not indestructible, and the problems begin to compound, especially when subjected to the kind of cack-handed maintenance that I lavished on my boat following, it seems, the tradition of most of its previous owners. Such abuse became apparent in the myriad of different size screws and screw-head-types that were holding the windows to the hull, as if one of the previous owners had a jar of every screw that had been left over from every DIY job imaginable and then used a random-number generator to select them for insertion into the holes in the window frame that, incidentally, were widening at different rates according to the level of contact between the dissimilar metals of the aluminium frames and steel screws. The rats’ nest of wiring, where some wires were simply twisted together and covered with self-adhesive insulation tape was, frankly, jaw-dropping. I was willing to sort through the 12-volt electrics, but it would have been another project on top of all the other projects that could have occupied all my weekends for the rest of my days on earth. I was grateful that the new owner took the boat off my hands knowing the scale of the work ahead of him.

The following table has a rough tally of dollar costs that I spent in owning Bolero. I trust it might be useful as a guide to how much it costs to own a 40-year-old 28-foot sailing boat. I am sure I missed some items, like the the anti-fouling and repair to the rudder. My sums worked out at a little under AUS$1000 per month, which sees a reasonable working estimate budget for someone considering a boat of a similar size and age. There is no such thing as a cheap boat.

Date	Cost	Description
Oct 2019	$20,000	Initial purchase
Oct 2019	$685	Surveyor's fee
Jan 2019	$1,940	Slipping
Oct 2019	$2,647	Marina fee
Oct 2019	$2,704	Batteries, propellor, depth sounder, slipping
Aug 2020	$365	Boat registration
Aug 2020	$80	VMR Marine Assist
Aug 2020	$513	Yacht club fee
Aug 2020	$605	Repair to boom bag, replace anchor chain and mainsail halyard
Aug 2020	$780	Insurance
Feb 2021	$704	Sundry parts for Bukh Diesel Engine
Aug 2021	$2,762	Marina fee
Aug 2021	$565	Yacht club fee
Oct 2021	$307	Upgrades for category rating for St Helena Cup
Nov 2021	$929	Sundry parts for Bukh Diesel Engine
Dec 2021	$3,410	Recondition Bukh Diesel Engine
Dec 2021	$689	Replacement engine exhaust elbow, thermostat, misc parts
Jan 2022	$597	Make a new engine bay floor
Aug 2022	$555	Yacht club fee
Aug 2022	$12,000	Gross sale price
Aug 2022	$4,400	Agent's commission, including GST
Aug 2022	$7,600	Net sale price
Total costs	$40,837
Net costs	$32,837
Number of months	35
Cost per month	$953

Episode 40 Conceding Defeat

The long and short of it

I have conceded defeat in my struggle with the Bukh DV10 LME diesel engine. The long story is told below, but the short story is that I ran out of time and energy. I could add money to the equation; it became a case of throwing good money after bad. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

In my last blog, I thought I had got to the end of the mechanicals and could start on the electricals (I had started to remove the crappy wiring and damaged switches). I was wrong. The engine refused to start. It had started in the workshop, but enough had happened between the workshop and boat to make it not start. Eventually, I found out that the problem was related to an eccentric bolt, which I should not have removed and replaced.

Despite offering money, I could not persuade the workshop mechanics to come to the boat to inspect the engine. They might have spotted something simple (in the end, they did) but it meant another afternoon of borrowing time from my son-in-law and his dad to get the engine out, another trip to the workshop in Loganholme, another wait while they got round to it, another $300 to adjust a bolt, and yet another afternoon of in-laws’ time to get the engine back in again.

Before getting the engine back in, I thought I would be clever by removing the 16kg flywheel to lighten the loads. Because it was so difficult to remove, I made a pulling jig, which damaged the copper winding on the already defunct generator inside the flywheel. Trying to be clever again, I applied some anti-seizing goo to the flywheel taper to make it easier to remove in future, which was a BIG mistake. I found, after the event, that the reason that the flywheel was so difficult to remove is that it relies on the friction between the flywheel and taper to hold it in place.

So, I finally got the engine in, connected the wires to the new starter battery that I had bought for the occasion and fired it up. It actually started … for about 10 seconds, died and refused to re-start.

Examining the video of what should have been a triumphant moment, I saw that the flywheel was slipping on the taper. I found that it had sheared the taper key, scored the taper and, worst of all,  a crack appeared in the flywheel on female surface of the taper.

That crack was the end of the engine. There was no way back from this, even if I managed to repair the taper and key. A repair to the taper would have needed complete disassembly of the engine and a return to the beginning, which would not have been worth it.

The engine was dead, the electrical switchgear had been pulled out, my boat was going nowhere. At a rough guess, I reckoned on spending another $15K and every weekend from now to Christmas to get the boat functional. Depending on market conditions and condition, I expected sale price of $20K to $30K for a fully functional boat. Circumstances at home demanded my weekends, work demanded my weeks, and there was no realistic possibility to spend the time needed on repairs. I decided to sell the boat, as is, where is. 

I sold it through an agent for a total of $12K. The agent took his cut (I’m not complaining as it was part of the deal), which put about $7600 in my pocket. The loss in value plus the lost costs on the engine rebuild amounted to about $20K. When asked whether I got what I wanted for the boat, I replied that I did, because I got peace of mind at a time when I needed it most. 

I should add that I am not optimistic about the used-boat market. With the easing of COVID restrictions, more people are likely to spend their money on travelling than COVID-toys such as boats. Also, the difficulty of disposing of end-of-life boats means that there will be a growing pool of 30 to 40 year old boats with indestructible GRP hulls that are riddled with problems to do with engines, wiring, leaking decks, broken fittings etc. etc. The growth of supply could outpace demand, which means that we are likely to see more hulks rotting on their moorings, and that will reduce the sale-value of the remaining functional and well-kept boats. 

The buyer was a boat designer and builder, who had the necessary parts and connections to fix up the boat, especially a functioning, used engine.

Lessons learned

I have learned a lot about diesel engines. The primary lesson, which has been costly, is to beware of rare and exotic engines. My Bukh DV10 LME fell into this category. It is much more difficult that you might imagine to get a mechanic interested in fixing one. Why should they invite trouble to their workshops, when they have a steady stream of the more common brands, such as Volvo, Yanmar, Nanni, Beta? 

Getting parts for rare and exotic engines is difficult and expensive. In my case, I had to pay $700 for the gaskets and about the same for a new exhaust elbow, which took weeks to arrive by post from New Zealand. 

Also beware of mechanics who do not know about your particular engine, or even about marine engines. I was alarmed at the information I needed to feed to my mechanic, such as the torque settings for the engine block bolts. I did not realise how valuable a detailed manual would become, or how much the mechanic would need to rely on one.

In conclusion

The Cavalier 28 is ideal for day-sails in Moreton Bay and hops up and down the coast for one to four persons on board. It is spacious and races well, especially with a folding propellor. Its racing pedigree was a major consideration for the new owner. Ultimately, though, it was the condition of the boat that finally killed it for me. I got sick of the shoddy workmanship and cowboy maintenance. Every new problem that surfaced added to my wife’s worries, which would have spoiled our enjoyment when, and if, I got the thing sailing again.

I will get back on the water gain, but not with something that has more fixing than sailing.

Episode 39 Diesel Engine Part 10 The End of the Mechanicals and the Start of the Electricals

My resistance to my inner perfectionist, by not shaving the tops off the engine beds, did not last long. I plead extenuating circumstances, which were brought about by the exhaust hose.

The exhaust hose comprises a section from the engine block to the muffler and a section from the muffler to the vent hole in the transom. The muffler must be secured at a lower level than the engine block, because it traps water. If the muffler were higher than the engine, this water could run down into the engine block, rusting the pistons and seizing them. The water trap muffles the noise of the exhaust, and also hinders water from a rogue wave posing water back up the exhaust hose, towards the engine. Ideally, the boat should have a short section of exhaust hose going down from the engine to the muffler, and another, longer, section running up from the muffler to a high point under the cockpit, before exiting through the transom. The high point under the cockpit drains the hose, in case water gets into it. The shorter the exhaust hose, the less water the engine needs to push out, if the exhaust hose gets flooded.

The previous arrangement was awkward, having too much hose and the muffler placed loosely on the floor. The only thing holding the muffler in place was the stiffness of the exhaust hose. Being aft of the engine, it was in a space that is inaccessible to anyone who was neither a dwarf nor a person with six foot extensions to his or her arms. I tried to make the necessary adjustments by reaching over the engine, or wriggling through into the space behind (it was almost impossible to wriggle out again). The required boat-yoga was physically exhaustion and the refitting and fixing the exhaust hose proved difficult and unsatisfactory. In the end, I decided to undo all the bolts and take the engine off its mounts, again. 

Having taken the engine off its mounts, I succumbed to my inner perfectionist, took the beds home and shaved off about 12m from the upper surfaces. Now that my hand-plane was razor sharp, this was easier than I had feared. I figured that the rear bearings were wound down to the stops, and the flange plates only just mated, which meant that something was rubbing on something else in the prop-shaft tube. I needed to drop the engine by about 5mm.

I swabbed out the engine bay, again, thinking that this might be the last clean it gets for a very long time, and set about cutting and fixing the hose. The rear part the hose was stiff and reinforced with steel wire, which I did not know until I started to cut it with a hacksaw. The steel wire also explained why I could not push it back onto the spigot on the muffler box. The spigot had an external diameter of 40mm and the hose an internal diameter of 38mm. Brute force would not get them to mate. A spade drill applied to the inside of the hose to ream it out did the trick. The loose ends were secured with hose clamps and the hoses and muffler box were secured with clamps and cable ties. In all, I shortened the rear hose by about one meter, and the forward hose by about 0.5m. 

Again, I re-assembled the beds and re-mounted the engine. This, I know, would not be the last time. Gratifyingly, the flange plates met somewhere in the middle of the prop-shaft tube. I had wound the rear bearings up by about 5mm, the reduction of the bed tops and this adjustment giving me the 5mm I was looking for. I adjusted the forward bearings until the feeler gauge told me that the prop-shaft flange and engine flange were parallel and in line. 

The reconnection of all the fuel and water hose lines marked the beginning of the end for the mechanical phase and the start of the start of the electrical phase.

I had been procrastinating on the electricals whilst I was sorting the mechanicals. My first engagement was to jury-rig a spare battery to the engine in an attempt to start it. The battery achieved about an eighth of a turn before giving up, needing a considerable recharge, but the exercise demonstrated that the starter motor and solenoid were in working order, but the electrical system in the boat was not.

The two factors that condemned the electrical system were the accumulation of poor initial design, consequent bodge-jobs and quick fixes that culminated in the current rats' nest of wiring, and the episode in which the leak in the shaft seal submerged the inside of the boat to about a foot of sea water. The flooding of the boat did not affect every electrical system on the boat, but, the many switches located near the floor were damaged.  I found a tide-mark on one of the batteries showing that the water stopped just a couple of inches below the terminals. The arrangement of switchgear at floor level was a design fault that was pointed out by my surveyor when I bought the boat, together with the absence of anything to hold down the batteries. Also, after spending countless hours baling out water from the bilges, I thought it was time to indulge in an automatic bilge pump.

My intent is to relocate all the switch gear to a new box that will be mounted at about head-height on the bulkhead to starboard of the companionway. This will do several things, including the prevention of further seawater leaks ruining low-lying switchgear. It will make the job of re-wiring the boat much more pleasant, as I will be able to see what I need to do at head-height. It will make the switches much more accessible, and it will provide a protected cavity for the backs of instruments mounted on the bulkhead. Further advantages include improved accessibility to the engine stop-start switches and anchor windlass from the companionway and, possibly, providing a mounting point for instrument panels that I might want to mount on hinges in the companionway (e.g., a monitor screen for a navigation computer). In any case, I like having switches and other electrical items stowed inside the boat when not in use, to protect it from the weather.

Other than getting the engine to start and stop at the flick of a button, the next steps are to learn 12V boat electrics.

Removing about 12mm from the tops of the engine beds

Planing the tops of the engine beds. This exposed several redundant holes that I had drilled in the undersides as part of the assembly process, which I then filled with epoxy resin.

Re-assembled engine

Checking clearances - starboard forward bearing

Checking clearances - port forward bearing

Checking clearances - starboard rear bearing

Checking clearances - port rear bearing

New exhaust hose arrangement, from engine block elbow (silver colour) to muffler box (brown plastic) to high point under cockpit floor to exit at transom (at rear of boat, not visible)

Current electrics around battery terminals

Tide mark on battery terminal showing how high the water got when the flange seal leaked.