The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Spare Parts—Which To Buy and How To Keep Track Of Them

S/V Morgan's Cloud in the slings at the Selfa Arctic boatyard at Rødskjær.

Picture this: Phyllis and I have just hauled Morgan’s Cloud in Arctic Norway, at vast expense, to inspect the shaft log. We’ve removed the rudder (not a trivial task) as it’s in the way of extracting the propeller shaft, removed the propeller and coupling, pulled the shaft, and cut the old cutless bearing out.

Finally, we are ready to install the new cutless bearing. I go to fetch it from the locker in the engine room where I stowed two of these special and hard-to-get bearings—ours have fibre carrier tubes, not metal, because our boat is aluminum—just before we left North America two years before. And…they’re not there!

We then go through two hours of panic-driven boat dismemberment before said bearings turn up stowed in a plastic box in the bilge under the head floor where some evil Norwegian Troll moved them just to make us crazy. (I refused to believe that an absent-minded skipper could have anything to do with this relocation.)

That was the day we decided that the task of creating a parts inventory, that we had long delayed, was job one. Easy to say, but amazingly hard to do well. In fact, it took us another three years to actually get it done.

Read on to learn about our parts inventory system and to download the spreadsheet that’s at the heart of it for you to use on your own boat.

And, finally, you can also download the same spreadsheet populated with the parts we carry on Morgan’s Cloud to give you a starting point as you decide what spare parts to buy.


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Dick Stevenson

Hi John, We do something quite similar and it is immensely helpful.It is a great winter project and you are quite right in pointing out it’s evolving nature. I look forward to the downloads which I can’t do quite yet.
Dick Stevenson, l/v Alchemy

Stan Carlyle

What an amazing list of materials. I contemplate doing the same thing and my mind goes into a spinning blank. You also have to constantly keep it up to date or it has no value. A huge amount of work to create it and steady work to keep it current. I’m impressed.
Excel is a powerful program and I use it daily. The keystrokes CTRL “F” bring up a search menu to find things within a spreadsheet. I can see it being useful to help find something within your inventory.

Stan

Bill Attwood

Hi John,
This really is a valuable post. Some skippers may consider adding a system of code for the locations. Marine Infantry are sometimes embarked on naval ships, and I can confirm from personal experience how difficult it is on a Commando Carrier to find your way around. All navies use a logical system of numbers and letters to designate compartments, and each compartment has its designation on a label affixed to the bulkhead. The same system can be applied to stowage on a yacht. A Google search will supply any details needed.
Regards,
Bill

Erik Snel

In preparation of our trip to the Azores this summer, I have decided that such an inventory list is also long overdue. I would like my list to have a physical counterpart, but would also like to be able to build/change it very easily. Also the system needs to be very accesible to others than myself.
Therefore I am now looking at an iPhone app called sortly. Advantage of this app is that you can connect parts to pictures with descriptions. Those pictures could be the different places we stow things. As you can easily print a list from Sortly, it would give a very easy way and recognizable way around all our lockers and storage area’s. And because the list starts in the app, things can easily be added and changed.

Eric Klem

I will admit to having never kept a good written inventory but I have always kept extremely detailed lists. These lists include projects, gear that needs to be brought on or off the boat, shopping lists, etc. When I was working aboard different boats, these were all paper based lists which were a bit of a pain once they grew over a single page as I would have to transcribe them occasionally. The biggest problem that I had was when I would think of something while my list wasn’t with me. I actually know people who keep scratch paper in their wallet to deal with this but I do not.

Now, I keep my lists in google doc spreadsheets which works reasonably well for me. The real advantage is that I can access it from many devices and the revision history has saved me a few times. I often create an initial entry in a spreadsheet from my phone on the boat that might look like “replace windlass solenoid”. When I am home and on my desktop computer, I will then put in information like where I should buy it, the price, when I need to buy it by, any additional stuff I might need like nuts or butt connectors, special tools that I need to grab from my shop for the project and then I have a field for general notes that don’t fit other categories. From this spreadsheet, I do my ordering, pack the car when going to the boatyard, check it every time I am at a hardware or marine store, etc. There is an obvious flaw in this for going to non-populated places in that google docs are not available without an internet connection so we print stuff out or move it temporarily to Excel. The other problem as John mentions is that typing on a phone is really annoying but this method allows me to input a teaser bit of information from wherever and then do the real entry on a computer.

Eric

Dick Stevenson

Stan, The list has value even if not kept constantly up to date. We find that an unhurried attentiveness gets the job done on a regular basis. For example, when doing the yearly cleaning of nooks and crannies, it is easy to get up what “should” be in that locker and see how close you are. A little bit of getting into the habit, before storage, of recording the products details is again not onerous but becomes everyday. Every 5 minutes of this recording saves hours down the road.
It is a valuable tool for thinking about your boat as well, as these stored items touch on every aspect of keeping a vessel seaworthy.
Finally, if you have a tad of OCD, the task can be quite gratifying.
Dick Stevenson, l/v Alchemy
Ps. OCD = obsessive compulsive disorder