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Montag, 3. April 2017
Youre kidding me right Youre not
"Igor, I'm ready, hand me the brain, and my magnifying glasses. Give me a little space Igor, and what have you been using for mouthwash? Road kill? Good I'm done Igor. Throw the big knife switch... AND IT'S ALIVE!.... Hmmm sort of at any rate. It drools a lot, it's picking its nose, and sniffing the acetone. Igor where did you get this brain from?" "Ah that's a long story boss, but you know that bar across from the Magnifico boat factory?"
I'm perpetually flabbergasted at the inane things I find on production boats. They slap them together, and let someone else worry about the consequences. Here is today's prime example of a basic task made excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible. This sail boat came from the factory with the wind instruments and autopilot installed during construction. I'm adding a new Raymarine e7D to the starboard steering station, Ram mount for the Ipad on the port less used steering station, and a SR6 network box with a Sirius receiver for weather.
The weather receiver antenna is a Shakespeare SRA 40. I'm removing the pedestal so what will be seen is just a 3 1/3" white hockey puck. The big plus is its wee small wire, and tiny little connector. It's typically very easy to pull this wire.
The perfect place to mount this little antenna is in the instrument housing above the companion way on this sailboat. There are only two instruments installed, plenty of room on the flat top, and access is really easy.
The two wind instruments are daisy chained together, and a single black and white spur cable leaves the compartment.
This cable routing was done during construction. There was no headliner, no trim yet, and everything is easy to get to. Apparently there was never even a passing thought you might want to add anything else here, for all time yet to come.
The wire passes through the fiberglass. Someone fitted a small piece of pipe that was raised up so water couldn't get into the hole. That was good idea, someone was using brain cells. The wire ends up under the headliner, turns ninety degrees, and then again ninety degrees and ends up behind the corner of the bulkhead heading downward. Hmmm this isn't starting to look good, and it wasn't.
The wire routes downward behind a wood panel strip that has been screwed on with small # 4 screws, but the trim has been installed over it, and the screw holes have been plugged, and finished.
Someone even went to the trouble to make sure the small screws were accessible, by relieving the area around them. The bottom of the panel strip is behind the flooring thus insuring you can't pull the bottom out.
I called the factory and asked, "How do I do the wire pull?" There is a pause from the nice guy I spoke to, "Did they plug the screw holes on the trim? I'm not sure they were supposed to. Well you could pull the plugs out and remove the trim pieces, You know how to do this don't you, You take a drill.....
My inside voice starts screaming at me. "Yes, I know how to do this, and after I've done it, I have to find the matching wood somewhere, make new plugs, glue them in, take a sharp chisel and trim the plugs, sand them smooth, find and apply the exact matching stains and finishes. You're killing me buddy. Why didn't you just make the trim pieces shorter in the first place so they didn't cover the strip? If you had, I might of had a chance of pulling a new wire. It still wouldn't have been easy, but at least maybe possible. The hole at the bottom of the strip was just large enough to pass the spur cable and nothing else. Do you know what conduit is? That round flexible plastic pipe stuff you pull wires through?"
The boat is leaving on a long trip tonight, and I still have other things to do. Reluctantly I go aft and install the antenna on top of the teak combing cap. The teak is thick, and I can't attach the nut underneath so it gets spot welded down with 3M 4200. I do a slithering spelunking run under the autopilot ram, and steering arm to route the antenna wire to the SR6, and get it plugged in. Later in the early evening I make phone calls to the boat while it's still in cell phone range to make sure everything is perfect, and things are not. A spur cable didn't lock in properly, and the auto pilot stopped talking to the e7D. Some brief screwdriver activity exposes the tee, and it's re-seated. I will know later today if there were other issues that need to taken care of.
"Igor, take our drooling friend Frank over to the Magnifico plant, and help him fill out an application for employment, I think he will fit in well there. And the next time get me a baboon brain like I asked for. I wanted an intelligent brain to work with."
Samstag, 18. März 2017
Its moving day no its not we are just marking time
The rusty meat cleaver repeatedly strikes the bundle of wires until they are completely severed. The tangled mess is then shoved into some fiberglass crevasse. Job done thinks the wire butcher, now what needs my finesse?
When boats ship by truck, they have to be lower than 13' 6" on the trailer to meet most height restrictions. So in this case, a Viking 53" Sport Cruiser was shipping out of Sarasota. Everything had to be removed off of the hardtop, packed, and stowed somewhere on the vessel. On this boat, as you can see below, Jeremy has already removed the Furuno radar, and is starting to pull the bolts for the stainless steel structure. I'm down below, getting ready to catch the stainless steel tower as it tips back, taking some pictures, talking on the phone, and doing other less than important things. There is also a Stratus TV antenna (serving no purpose in life now), Furuno GPS receiver, a pair of electric horns, a Digital Antenna VHF, and a Digital Antenna FM antenna. This is a pretty basic set of gear on this boat. You can also encounter satellite domes of various types and functions, and many other types of antennas, and flag poles.
So here is what important to me, having been on the receiving end of many boats that have been shipped, is how much care did the other guy put into the disassembly? Did he leave me notes behind, saying where things were stowed? Was care taken in labeling the wiring, so I don't have to guess what was connected to what? Or did he just have his pet beaver chew the wires apart, and shove them unlabeled into the hole. In the case of this boat, there are two four foot antennas, that appear to be identical. One is the VHF antenna, and the other is an FM antenna, although from their appearance, you can't tell the difference. What ever nomenclature was originally on these antennas, is long gone. So out comes the labels, and in a minute or two, the problem is solved for the next guy. In the picture below, everything has been removed, a clear piece of plastic was used to close the radar mount hole, and the other penetrations have been sealed.
I carry this little Brother label maker with me in the truck. It is inexpensive, doesn't take up much room, and is indispensable. Like printer companies who almost give the hardware away, just so they can sell you the ink, the label maker companies, are really in the business of selling you the labels. Regardless of this, a label costs pennies to make, and can save hours of effort when you are reassembling a tangled wad of wiring. I also use this little machine to label anything on a boat, that I have struggled to identify, so the next time I visit, I won't have to do it again. I love adding something new to a boat years later, and finding that pull string, or label I left in place is still there. I think to myself, "What a good boy I was", at least on that day.
So our job was done for the day. While we were removing the electronics, some colleagues of mine, using wrenches, and socket sets that take two hands to carry, were pulling the props, and stowing them in the engine compartment. The truck pulls up the next day, but there is a problem, the boat is still to high. A new trailer is needed, and the shafts, rudders, and struts have to be removed. Seven hours later, minus lots of difficult to remove running gear, the boat is set on the new trailer, and the tape measure still says it is too high. Gods from afar consult, and command the boat is to be reassembled, and a captain will transport it to its destination. My phone rings, and would we please reassemble the electronics. It took a little over 5 five hours to remove the stuff, and stow it. It took three and a half hours to reassemble, and test the gear. Good thing we labeled all of that colorful spaghetti! I'm not surprised, it's a boat
Montag, 27. Februar 2017
The world is not flat
This should have been an easy job, and it would have been if the guy who designed this helm, had not been a frustrated artist, with a curvaceous fixation. There was an older chart plotter/sounder mounted in the hole, and the task at hand is to mount a Garmin 5212 into the console. But beware, the eye can fool you.
I put a piece of blue tape on the console to show you what you can't easily see in the picture above. The console gently, in a pain in the ass sort of way, curves forward leaving only about 7" of actual flat space to mount anything. This is one of those worst case examples of function follows form. Pretty, sort of, pragmatic no.
There is always a way, and in this case, the answer is a white acrylic wedge to fill in the inevitable gap that will exist at the top of the chart plotter. I have three words to describe making this wedge. Fiddly, fiddly, fiddly.
Annoying problem number one is to find a reference for level, and there isn't one, and I will come back to this later. So I started with a straight edge, and marked where the flat surface started at the bottom of the console, and where it ended near the top of the console. It turns out that this is about 7", and I need 9" and change. I took a piece of cardboard, and spiled it to fit the curve. The cardboard, now matching the curve, was taped onto the console, and using a straight edge, the flat console plane was extended upward with a pencil line on the cardboard. Laying the cardboard template onto the chart plotter template allowed me to measure the height of this little wedge fabrication, and to see where the bottom edge of the wedge was going to meet the undersides of the chart plotter. All of this work was just to make the small triangular sides of the wedge you see above. Fiddly was an understatement.
So clutching the template, I go off to Delcraft and spend half an hour drawing little pictures, and explaining to Bob what it had to look like, and a couple days later I have the part in my hands.
I know about where this wedge needs to be, and I have about +- 1/4" of play up, and down in placement on the console where the wedge matches the curve. To get some sort of reference, I took a flat piece of plate aluminum that was about a foot square and laid it onto the top of the console, and slid it over the edge of the console. I could them measure up to it, and make the wedge parallel to the plate, and the top of the console. This was as good as it was going to get.
I epoxied the wedge onto the console, taped on the template, told the boat to turn its head and cough, and in a few minutes, the rotozip had done the cutout. This worked out really well, and looked great in the end, but a little bit of foresight on the part of the designer would have made this a short and sweet job. There was enough, just barely enough space behind the console for the unit to fit, which is another thing I would like boat designers to think about.
So what does the installer want the designers to consider? You need flat spaces to mount gear in, so please provide it. Leave plenty of room behind the console, deeper is better. Don't do that Cyclops Syndrome thing, and mount things right smack in the center of the console. There should always be room to mount the primary chart plotter directly in front of the helm operator. Another small gripe I have is with the templates I have to use. I think it would be a good idea to have bold, and straight reference lines both vertically, and horizontally on the templates to give both my eyes, and tape measure the best chance of getting it located correctly, especially when units have curved surfaces. I'm going to keep nagging until I see some real progress here in helm design and layout.
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