| s/y Fiona - our Bruce Roberts Offshore 44' |
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Copyright (c) 2005-2023 Martin Erlandson, Sweden
Pandemic over - WAR is coming!
Every year on the 6:th of November Sweden eats a King pastry!
To the honor (?) of the war King Gustav II Adolf who died in battle 1632.
This year we had a different pastry...
Winter work continued in the man cave at home.
A new sturdy fender board was constructed. All the anchors and chains got peculiar colorings.
Anchors got a red back/neck so that they as easy to locate on the bottom. The chains got meter markings for every centimeter...joking. On the base color eg green there are 2 white marks for 20 meter, 3 white at 30 meter. More more precise not needed. At 50 meter on the main chain, 12 mm, is a long red mark with 1 white and at the chain end-start of line another red with 2 white - then 30 meter of unmarket line! Oh dear...
Now it was time again to flush the system and change the coolant liquid in the engine after 5 years of use. So I took the opportunity to inspect the cylinderheds coolant interioour.
At the end of the cylinderhead is a lifting point combined with a lid for the coolant. The engine is a marinsed Leyland by Thornycroft from the 80ties. They used only bronze and marine grade aluminum so there is no need for sacrifizing anodes. Now was a perfect time to add one small Zink at least, so I did that as it can't hurt.
The thermostat was checked in a kettle and with a marking at 82 degrees is started to open at 75 and fully open at 90. Old Cool engines :-)
But with the seawaterpump thers another story. I had noticed a tiny-tiny leak making the brass to go green...
When losing the bolts they snaped off!
Turns out that the gasket was of low quality and water had passed inside the gasket reaching the mild steel bolt and corroded away. I could save all threads in the pump and after quite some reasearch found stainless UNF bolts online. New impeller of course. I usually inspects the impeller every second year (well it depends...) and replace it if any cracks.
I was throwing a way garbage and suddenly I where dumpster diving - well, I just reach my arm in and grabbed the Wind speed and Wind Direction sensor! Just what I needed! Ok, it was old and probably not working.
Fun project to save 1000€ isch?
It turned out that the two magnetic sensor for wind direction where ok but the hall-effect sensor for the wind speed where dead but I happen to have a couple at home :-). Mechanically all was ok after some cleaning, greasing and painting. However I don't have the instrument for the sensor…
But I had a AT-Tiny85 - a 8 pin smart micro controller that would fit perfectly. So two analog values from wind direction and one digital pulse from wind speed s input and one pin for serial NMEA and 2 ping for power - I have 1 pin over :-). I 3D printed a mount bracket with room for the controller and sealed it good.
It sits perfectly over the radar doom. Yes the wind is disturbed from the mast when coming from that direction but I can't sail against the wind so it's not important. The wind direction will mainly be used by the PyPilot autopilot in the future. In general I don't like to have stuff high up in the mast.
Calibration was done with driving the car and holding the wind speed sensor out the windows recording car speed (gps) and wind speed on a PC with OpenCpn.
and we had a little party...
