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Showing posts from September, 2019

Water… where you don't want it!

An irritating problem, and don't know if there are any structural diagrams for the K20+ Here's what happened: I fitted a new bladder type water tank under the starboard cabin berth. The filler pipe goes through the starboard lazarette/locker into this bladder. It works very well. This week in filling up the tank I didn't notice the filler pipe had come off the deck fitting... meaning that it filled up the starboard lazarette/locker. This overflowed into the void betwee n the locker and the under starboard berth... that void appears to be connected to a void under the main cabin, possibly under the cockpit... So there is water sloshing around there. Well, not just there. When I rewired the boat I put the battery in what was the starboard wet locker (we don't really need a wet locker in the Med, but we do need an electric cool box which is located there). So the cables went under the port berth. Somehow it appears that the under cabin void is connected to a void b

wind sensor working… now time for a sail

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Well it's working now! The wind sensor that is. And I'm very pleased with it. There was one difficulty, and that was threading the wire down the inside of the mast. My idea was to attach a screw to some whipping twine and drop that, then attach the cable and pull it through. Helen was at the bottom of the mast trying to hear how far down the mast it got. It never got to the bottom, that's for sure.  So then I tried taping a screw on the wire itself and dropping that. With a lot of jiggling it ended up at the bottom of the mast and then I could solder the connections and route the wire though to the display. Then we needed to calibrate the sensor. So this time Helen went up the mast and I touched the relevant wires together and hey presto… we had a working wind sensor. This final step we did before going out for a sail. The winds were light -- 9-12 knots but enabled us to get very close to across the bay and back. A really enjoyable sail. When we got to

Fitting Wind Sensor

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I have a depth gauge on Liza and the only other thing I really want in the instrument line is a wind sensor and indicator. Yes, I know a couple of strands of wool or torn sail cloth attached to the standing rigging goes a long way, but something a little better was needed. So I bought a Nasa Marine Target 2 system while I was visiting the UK in August. It looked simple enough to fit. Masthead unit and a display unit! All I need to do is use the bosuns chair, up the mast, four screws and I'm done! Well, firstly, Liza is light so I thought I'd let Helen try it as she's a lot lighter than me and so would swing at the top of the mast less. Drilling with the battery drill into the mast proved beyond her, so two days ago I went up… Because Liza only displaces 1.2 tonnes and the twin keels of Liza are only 500kg combined, it's quite tricky I found at the top of the mast compared to larger boats (which I was more used to). Any slight movement and I swung around