Mastodon

We're looking for the trash fence...

Laptop Search Continues

Posted on Wed 02 December 2009 in Geek

Here’s a great wikipedia entry for screens and laptops which support multitouch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Multi-Touch_Computers_and_Monitors


Weekend Update

Posted on Mon 23 November 2009 in Uncategorized

We got a lot done but not as much as we wanted.

Portholes

Dawn pulled out the two starboard side 5x12 plastic (cringe) Beckson portholes and cut out a big section of completely dry rotted teak around each porthole. I then resized the openings to fit the new portholes. It was about a 1/4” of material that needed to be removed.  Dawn then made a paper template of the area we needed to repair and cut that out of 1/4” plywood. We then attached that new piece of wood directly to the hull with 3M 5200 and tied into the drip rail with screws. This gives us a base layer on top of which we’ll be installing an additional layer of 1/4” A4 Birch plywood which will then become the painted finished surface. When that is done we’ll install the new gorgeous New Found Metals portholes.

Porthole Water Damage (aka Before)

Demolition of rotted wood

Base Layer Repair

V-Drive

The v-drive work was pretty easy. I pulled the cover drained the water and using a screwdriver pulled away a lot of the corrosion. In the process I broke off a bit of metal around one of the bolt holes and that made me nervous so I’m going to talk to Walter Gear about the V-Drive and see if I should keep going or call it good enough for now and wait for the whole unit to die. They don’t make the RV-20 anymore so replacing it would be a bit complicated but other owners have done it.

V-Drive Corrosion

Windlass and Thru-Hulls

All the bits of the windlass are now removed and the holes are ready to be glassed closed.

I ground off the head of the one thru-hull and was not able to shove it through as the yard suggested so I’m going to let them get it the rest of the way out. I’m also going to have them pull and close the knot meter thru-hull. Airmar is coming out with a new DepthSpeedTemperature instrument that has no log wheel which means no wheel to get gummed up. I’m waiting to hear more about that, but for now we’ll live with the depth transducer as is and then replace it when the new Airmar is available.

Bilge Hoses

I did a bit of grunt work and I by that I mean work involving a lot of grunting as I wriggled around in the bilge and the stern lazerette (which is actually quite roomy) and pulled all of the bilge pump hoses (main, backup and manual) which were original, covered in oil in the bilge and as I found later one of which also had a big cut in it which would definitely have let water in the boat when pumping out and if a following sea came in the hose. The hose clamps on the stern are completely rusted and I will need to cut those off and replace with 316 Stainless Steel clamps. This is part of a general pulling and replace of below the waterline hoses I’m doing since we’re sitting out high and dry. Here’s a shot of me in the bilge.

Patrick in the bilge


Next set of things in the refit

Posted on Thu 19 November 2009 in Projects

The boat has been moved form sitting in the yard where the bottom was prepped and painted, some keel damaged was repaired (oopsy), the v-berth was prepped by me, and the windlass was removed. The boat is now sitting inside the prep tent. I’ve not been to it yet, but I’ll go tomorrow and take a bunch of pictures.

from gave me a call about some blisters he saw along the waterline. We’re not sure if it’s just a paint issue or if there is some gelcoat damage. We’ll know more when they start to prep for painting. This is one of those “known unknowns” which could be nothing or could be expensive. We’ll find out soon enough.

The yard is prepping the boat for repainting the stripes, and I aguess polishing the hull as well as a bunch of fiberglass projects including closing up some thru-hulls, reinforcing the v-berth and moving the windlass. I also have a lot of chores to do:

  • Grind off a thru-hull so it can be pushed in and then glassed closed.
  • Remove the teak trim from the deck where the windlass was removed.
  • Cleanup the water jacket in the VDrive and sand off the corrosion on the input shaft.
  • I have a lot of measuring to do to determine the wire lengths needed for the new electronics and mast lights. I’ll start with just the lengths needed for the masts plus some extra so I can put in terminal blocks or connectors which will allow the masts to be pulled without cutting any wires.
  • I also want to work on replacing the hoses below the waterline. I’ll pull the hoses, measure them and pickup new hose from Fisheries or West Marine.
  • Dawn is probably going to star on the portholes or at least getting all of the pieces in place to make it happen.

Very busy weekend!!


New Laptop Search

Posted on Thu 19 November 2009 in Geek

Since my laptop screen cracked months ago I’ve been waiting for Windows 7 to come out so I could get a new laptop, this will very likely be the laptop I take cruising as my personal machine. I’ll probably have a dedicated machine at the nav station. Here’s what I’m looking for feature-wise and some quick searching I did. If you have any suggestion lets me know…

Must Have

  • Multi-Touch Screen
  • Multi-Touch Touchpad
  • Minimum 4GB RAM
  • Minimum 300GB Storage
  • 64 Bit
  • Wifi

Optional

  • Built-in GPS
  • Tablet format
  • SDD system drive
  • 3G

Light Research

  • Dell
  • Studio 17 – Not yet shipping, Unclear about Multi-touch monitor or touch pad, but claims it as optional
  • Asus – Wow what a horrible web site…
  • Lenovo
  • IdeaPad U550 - 374955U \$800 - multitouch
  • ThinkPad T400s – Way exoensive, small drive multitouch
  • Toshiba
  • Protege Tablets – Touch, no 64bit
  • Satellite Pro U500-EZ1311  32bit - \$1000
  • Acer
  • Aspire 5738
    • AS5738PG-6306 – Touch, 4gb TAM, 15.6”, 64bit - \$770 on B&H
  • HP
  • TX2 – TX2Z – 12.1” Tablet PC - Has all features when customized for \$964
  • Fujitsu
  • T5010 - 13.3" screen Tablet PC - Not sure about 64bit. \$2300 (eek)

The Refit begins !

Posted on Fri 13 November 2009 in Projects

If you follow @DeepPlaya on twitter you know a lot of this stuff, but for those of you who only read the blog here’s the full scoop.

Wednesday afternoon we moved Deep Playa over to A dock where <The Yard> uses the fixed mount haul out cranes (you could pull your dinghy this way) to remove masts. Because the cranes are fixed height you have to time all of this with the right tide to allow them to lift or lower your masts successfully. We got there right on time which in boatyard time means we were early. We milled around then docked and went to work. Basics steps to de-rigging your boat are as follows:

  1. Remove all of your sails and running rigging
  2. Unhook all of your mast lead wiring. This may require cutting some wires, you can add a terminal strip afterwards.\ You might want to lift the mast and see if there any connectors within the mast instead of cutting directly.
  3. Remove any boots around the mast if it is keel stepped
  4. Attach crane to the mast and snug it slightly so it will keep anything from falling over
  5. Pull all the cotter pins from the rig and loosen all the turnbuckles. Depending on your rig some can be removed before others.
  6. Snug the crane
  7. Completely [remove] disconnect all the standing rigging (Thanks Tom for the clarification)
  8. Lift the mast off of it’s step, being careful to lead all the wires cleanly out.
  9. Put the masts on a cart and take them to the yard or lower and fasten them on deck.

So, that’s the ideal way to do things assuming everything goes perfectly. I did not remove my wiring before I got there so I had to quickly do that. I ended up cutting the thick data wire to the RADAR (which I plan to upgrade) only to learn there was a connecter under the mizzenmast. The main could not be picked form its maststep. The aluminum mast was fused to the steel step, horrible combination of metals.

Because they couldn’t get the main out and it was dark we had to wait to finish pulling the rig until the following morning. They managed to get the mast out by grinding off the bolt heads holding the main maststep to the boat, then the pulled the whole mast, step and all up a few feet and knocked the step off the mast with a hammer. With the step removed the whole thing slide right out.

Now that the rig is down the boat was hauled and setup on jacks in the yard.

I spent the remainder of the day removing hardware from the masts. This went much better than the booms. There was a lot more hardware that easily unscrewed. I still have quite a bit left to do, but it feels good to be making progress rather than waiting to start.

You can see more pics of the refit as it goes along in our 2009 Refit set on Flickr.


Articles around the sound

Posted on Fri 30 October 2009 in Destinations - Puget Sound

These are  set of links I had squirreled away with the weather turning ugly, it's time to start looking at where you want to go when the weather is better

  • Seattle area hot spots by SeaMagazine
  • Edmonds and Kingston article by SeaMagazine
  • Port of Everett by SeaMagazine
  • Port Ludlow and Port Haddock by SeaMagazine
  • Winslow, Eagle and Blakely harbors by SeaMagazine
  • Bainbridge Island by SeaMagazine
  • Bell Street Pier by SeaMagazine
  • Elliot Bay by SeaMagazine
  • Hood Canal by SeaMagazine
  • Coupeville by SeaMagazine
  • Blake Island by SeaMagazine

Finally posted a pic

Posted on Thu 29 October 2009 in Site Changes

It's not a shot of me on the boat, but I finally uploaded a picture taken by my friend Ramez to the About Us page to go along with the cute "wench" shot of Dawn. You can't tell but I'm am wearing my kilt in the picture so I'm also pretty pirate-like in my own way.

On unrelated news, I hurt my rib about 3 weeks ago at hockey and I've been laying pretty low, going to the ND and Accupuncture to quicken the mend. I think I'm getitng back to normal and we should be back in full swing on the refit shortly which means more posts and news to share along the way!

I'm also working on a wiki to go along with the blog. The wiki will replace the "pages" portion of the site and also serve as a place for me to write up documentation about how things work or are configured on Deep Playa. My plan is that I can then print or save the wiki to disk and have a decent manual for the boat.


Cleaning the Boom for Refinishing

Posted on Mon 12 October 2009 in Systems - Rigging

It has lasers

Main & mizzen boomsdo

As part of “The Refit” we’re going to have the spars refinished. In order to that you have to remove all of the hardware from the spars (masts, booms, spreaders). You can pay \$80 an hour to have to the yard do it, or you can buy a \$180 drill press and spend a lot of your own hours doing it. Since we have a workshop, that’s pretty much a no brainer. The Ryobi Drill press was acquired along with some cobalt drill bits (\$45!!!). The drill bits were worth it. They have definitely held up and I’m am very abusive to drill bits. When working with metal you need to let the bits cool down more than I do. when I using standard bits they were burning up lik emad; these are holding up very well.

I broke it

We haven’t pulled the entire rig, just the sails, running rigging and booms. I’ve completely removed all the hardware from bottom booms and only had one real oopsy and that was when I broke the off a piece of the boom end cap that holds the outhaul. I’m not even sure these cast aluminum caps are going to be worth re-using so I’m not that concerned about it to be honest.

Thus far everything has been going pretty well the booms were a good step project to working on the masts when we have the rigged pulled.


Refit Planning and Initial Work Underway

Posted on Mon 12 October 2009 in Uncategorized

<I wrote this last week>

I met with two yards and a third failed to get back to me at all after I sent them my then 4 page (now 7) word doc about my plans. Both yards had essentially the same bill rates and yard rules, I chose to go with the one who got back to me when they said they would and followed my directions more precisely in providing the quote. I’ll divulge the yard and all those details after the work is over and I have a better feel for their work. But the choice has been made and I’m excited to get going.

In meeting with both yards (and when you meet with your yard manager) I think it pays for you to have an opinion about everything and let them try to influence you. For every item in my list, where I had a good idea (wrong or right) about what I wanted done, I could have an intelligent conversation about the plan and they could provide real feedback and cost projections. For every item where I was still very open ended the conversation was really poor. I didn’t really know what I wanted, they don’t know me yet so didn’t really know which way to direct me. Unless I (or you) are willing to just let them do the work how they want with little input I think it behooves you to have your own plan and ask them to review and correct or modify the plan based on their experience. Be organized is the mantra. I have the word doc I mentioned and a spreadsheet of a 160+ items listing all the major parts I’ll need. Another thing that has been helpful is to be open minded, put in the wish list have a decent ideas of your priorities and then let the costs drive the cuts. Also think about what you have to do now (like while the boat is out of the water or while the rig is down) and what can wait or be added later on your own dime at the slip.So, given all of that I think you see a bit more about how I go about things.

In today’s meeting with the yard we discussed the windlass installation a bit more and they are recommending not doing a big fiberglass project, but instead using a 1/2” stainless steel plate to mount the windlass to the deck. He penciled up a drawing of the plate being bolted through the deck joint, but I’m not sure now as I write this how that would work on my bow where the deck joint is the toe rail. That big stainless plate might look great though and I’m sure there’s a way to mount it securely. The real next step on that project is to get the windlass here, set it on the deck and figure it out. We’ve decided to go with a Lofrans Tigres windlass based on the good SSCA reviews, but it’s not ordered yet. The yard is going to dig up some pics of similar installs for me to review.

In addition to making a little progress on the windlass the big thing I've done today is work on the parts spreadsheet. I’ve been going through an finalizing items so I have a make and model for every item that needs one and I'm looking for prices online. I’m comparing Fisheries Supply, West Marine and Defender. Fisheries doesn’t carry Maretron so that is limiting their usefulness quite a bit and their prics are coming out roughly the same as West Marine; Defender’s prices are coming out cheaper almost across the board. There are some tricks to use at Fisheries I’ve not tried yet, but it might not be worth it if they carry very few of the items I want.

On the boat I pulled down all the sails, running rigging and the booms. The booms are in the workshop and I’m removing all the hardware from them in preparation for them to be refinished. I was using a lot of hand power tools, but last night I bought a Ryobi 12” Drill Press and it has been awesome. It’s way more powerful and doesn’t tire me out as fast as using a hand drill. For all the screws that aren’t coming out after an overnight soak in PB Blaster (99% of them) I use the drill press to remove the head of the screw. Once that is off I pry the piece of hadware off the mast and then use a pair of vie grips to unscrew the screw from the mast. This works 95% of the time. The the other 5% the screw snaps off flush with the mast. For those I need to go back and drill out the screws.


ScanMyPhotos.com Price Increase

Posted on Thu 01 October 2009 in Landlubber life

I just got an email announcing new pricing:

While our last rate change was in 2007, in order to maintain our high level of customer service and upgraded technology infrastructure, certain adjustments will occur on October 10th.  The new rate schedule applies to prepaid fill-the-box photo scanning (\$149.95) and some standard photo scanning services (\$64.95 to scan up to 1,000 photos).  Always save 10% (up to \$25 by entering this promo code on the order page: TWITTER.

Click here to order by October 10th at the current rates!