The local yard have put Blue Opal’s stern gear back together, and applied an epoxy job to keep the top bolt in place. The anti-foul looks pretty good against her blue hull, but no one will ever see it. Research
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
Sodding autopilot reference transducer .. disconnected again!
Yep, it’s fallen out again. So Loctite didn’t work, epoxy didn’t work. I suspect the epoxy may not have got a good bond in the splined cavity, but have no way to prove that. Unfortunately, a replacement unit (because it’s
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
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
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