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I have a couple of questions about that engine panel box. How did you route all the wires ? I would have thought there would be a huge bundle, perhaps too thick to thread into the pedestal guard tubes.
Also, what did you do to plug the opening in the original factory mounted location of the engine panel?
What a novel idea to be able to see things like engine RPMs, Temp and voltage while the engine is running and you are underway without someone standing on their head in the way of the helmsman. Or the helmsman can abandon the wheel and try to see for himself. Does the kill cable run up there too? The belaying pins look very salty and could come in handy for keeping the crew in line as well as all the lines that want to end up under foot. Nice, Steve.
Excellent questions....The rectangular opening in the side of the cockpit where the engine panel used to be is now home to a cockpit shower. An added benefit of getting the engine panel out of the cockpit well is that it won't get flooded by a boarding wave.
I did have to modify the wiring harness between the panel and the engine to get the bundle small enough to fit in the 1 1/4" OD Navpod pedestal tubes. The only wires that were heavy guage (#12) were the glow plug and start solenoid. I replaced them with lighter gauge wires running to two 40 amp relays, one for the starter solenoid and one for the glow plugs. I was previously having trouble with starting, due to the long wiring harness and its undersized starting circuit wires. Now I get really strong preheat and starting operation with minimum voltage drop. The wires for all the other instruments (volts, temp, oil pressure) and even the engine kill solenoid (it's a BetaMarine BD722 engine) are all relatively light gauge. Amazingly there's absolutely no effect on the binnacle compass. I guess the little windings in the instrument gauges cancel each others' magnetic field, but the compass doesn't deflect when the panel is energized.
Beautiful. Always a pleasure to see nice, imaginative work. I also toyed with the idea of a belaying pin rack (one per side, actually), but decided against it because folks (including myself) enjoy sitting back-to-cabin, facing aft, kness drawn up, while at anchor with a coldie in hand.
Carter, that spot was always at a premium on our Typhoon and I didn't feel I could take it to mount insturments. Looking at the belaying pin rack it would be easy to make a cushion that slipped over a couple of pins and have a very comfy nest in there. Those brass/bronze belaying pins look about right for the job. So where did they come from? I belonged to a wood turners club and a few years back we made all of the pins for the Amistad when she was being built at Mystic. It was a fun project. I got to make 3 and I was the only one to carve my initials on the end so I can peak under and find my pins on board this historic vessel. It would have been nice if everyone had signed their work in this way. So a new command from the captain could be "belay the cockpit cushions, all hands relax". Have fun, Steve.
Steve is right Carter. A cushion does solve the problem of leaning against the pin rack. A side note on the rack. We had to start considering excess line storage when we ran the main halyard aft and started pulling the staysail boom up parallel with the roller furled staysail. When the main is up and the staysail deployed there's a lot of excess line in the cockpit, which can be a real hazard under foot. Back to the side note...the pins also make an excellent place to temporarily hang cockpit accessories like binoculars, the handheld VHF, safety tethers etc. We were lucky enough to score the bronze pins from Hamiltion Marine, a superb Maine based chandlery. As of last summer they had four left and we bought 3 at $59 each. They may have restocked or at least know what their source was. Saw the Amistad sailing in Block Island Sound last summer. What a beauty!
Someone asked if we'd been to Georgetown on Great Exuma...we're headed that way. The Cruisers Regatta starts on March 9 and there should be more than 400 cruising boats in the 9 mile long harbor for this 12 day event. Have yet to see any other Cape Dories in the Bahamas this winter, but everyone admires the CD31, and I have to grudgingly admit it's hard to find a prettier boat in these parts, except for the Bahamian racing sloops. Now that I know how to post pix, I'll try and send some pix of the incredible Exumas where you can see the bottom quite clearly in twenty feet of water.
