Mechanical

John answers an interesting question on the relative benefits of installing a watermaker…or not.

Do you carry aluminum propane tanks like we do on “Morgan’s Cloud”? If so, you need to listen up as Phyllis shares some things about re-certifying and replacing them that we learned the hard way…$500 worth of hard way.

Here’s a simple easy-to-build gadget that will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your freezer, by circulating the air so the stuff at the top and farthest from the plates does not thaw, while the food at the bottom and against the plates remains frozen, particularly when the freezer is packed tight.

Have you ever wondered if a diesel electric drive would be a good option for your boat? It’s a complicated decision, but it just got a got simpler.

Electric and diesel electric (hybrid) drives have become all the rage in recent years. But are they really a more efficient option for offshore cruising sailboats? In this chapter we take a solid and arithmetically rigorous approach, based on advice from two professional engineers with substantial experience of electric drive use on land, to cut through the hype and answer that question.

Regular readers of this site will know that I take a more than passing interest in fuel quality and our dependence on engine reliability. I believe that these are matters that go to the heart of modern cruising. Therefore, I also believe that anything that can offer improvements in terms of engine reliability has got to [...]

Will we get there on time? Those of us with a few years under our belt have seen extraordinary changes in the world of sailing during our lifetimes, not just in terms of the sailing performance of the boats we sail, but also in their comfort and safety, which in turn generates the confidence for [...]

Following our arrival in the Canary Islands last autumn we watched an endless stream of yachts line up at the pontoon alongside the boatyard, all of them with fuel contamination problems. In my experience, it’s usual to find that in cases like this the outbreak can be isolated to one or two suppliers who have [...]

When we took delivery of our new OVNI 435 in 2008, we decided to stick with the standard 3 bladed propeller, partly for reasons of cost (we were running out of cash!). But on all of my previous boats I’d had either a folding or feathering prop, and fully intended to fit one to Pèlerin [...]

This is a small FYI post about a big pain in the butt! The gotcha started innocently enough with me blithely loading our propane tanks into the back of the car and driving to our local Canadian Tire to get them filled—as I had done with no problems in the past—prior to our heading south [...]

Question: Do you have a rope cutter? I ask because we are thinking of fitting an Ambassador Stripper (stainless) to a new build alloy [aluminum] yacht with an alloy sterntube, and we wonder if it is possible to get the two to live happily together. Answer: Some twenty years ago we picked up a ball [...]

Last year our venerable and functional 9 gallon Allcraft water heater (on the right) finally bit the big one after 15 years of faithful service. And, wouldn’t you know it, Allcraft had gone out of business. So, after some fairly perfunctory research—how big a deal could a water heater be?—we ordered a new stainless steel [...]

Initially we were firmly in the rebuild camp, as were most of the experts we consulted. After all, at 6000 hours our engine is, in the words of David in his comment, “[a] baby and has many hours running [still] available”. Rebuilding would also save all the expense and aggravation of changing all kinds of [...]

We are in the throes of re-powering Morgan’s Cloud, and as far as we are concerned, this unpleasant and expensive task has come about 4000 engine hours too early. A couple of years ago we started to notice that we were getting much more soot on the transom from the exhaust than we liked. Then [...]