Tag: maintenance
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Cutless bearing troubles
Blue Opal has been developing a low grumble/rumble when the engine is running under load. The suspicion was that the cutless bearing was deteriorating, because the engine itself sounds very smooth, and there’s no grinding in the gearbox. Finally got her lifted over at the local yard this week, mostly to clean and anti-foul the…
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Suited, booted, and wired
Blue Opal is back to two house batteries now, in a parallel arrangement. I ordered a whole bunch of parts from Marine Parts Direct, and a Draper battery terminal crimper from Amazon (the club doesn’t have one, and doing it with a spanner and a hammer didn’t seem right), and have spent some hours over…
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Fixing the autopilot reference transducer, again
With K visiting over the weekend, it was a good time to re-fit the registration arm for the autopilot; she fits down the locker much more easily than I do. So, on Saturday, I roughed the splined pin with a small file to clean off the Loctite-clone and provide a good bonding surface, coated it…
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Battery diagram for Blue Opal
Courtesy of Dad, I have an easy-to-maintain set of wiring diagrams for Blue Opal. These diagrams are built using a text format called dot, and turned into an image automatically using Graphviz. The source for this particular diagram can be found here. [graphviz] graph hierarchy{ node [shape=record, fontname=”Arial”,fontsize=8, style=filled]; edge [penwidth=3]; label=”Blue Opal Wiring Diagram:…
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Further work with the Sterling ProSplit R
Sunday saw more work on the installation of the ProSplit R; I had already got all of the terminals wired up by Saturday, or so I thought. However, it turns out that I’d missed the part in the instructions about the positive terminal that needs a take-off from the D+/61/L terminal of the alternator (as…
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Sterling ProSplit R mounting template
When documenting the various power cables that run through Blue Opal, I checked the output voltage of the alternator, and the voltage flowing in to the batteries. There was approximately a 1V drop, which comes from the diode splitter that was fitted years ago. Since I’m not in a marina, or otherwise on shore power,…