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by steve, on November 24th, 2010 ( New Zealand) The main project for Wednesday was to fix the steering gear. This required three walks to the other end of the boat yard to check on the parts, collect them, and then to go back to have a little taken off each of the pins and to have an extra sleeve made up for the starboard pin. The walk takes a little while but is always slowed down by bumping into folks. Anyway, the job was done and I’m more than happy with the results. The news on our car is that it is being processed and should be here Friday evening. I now have funds in the country so tomorrow I’ll go into Paihia to have a cashier’s cheque drawn.
Today it’s been more walking up and down the boat yard to put in some improvements on the aircon/heating system. There are two separate issues with each of the units under the aft bunks. If we don’t shut the sea cocks when sailing, both of them collect air bubbles in the water cooling circuit very quickly creating airlocks in the pumps. The only way around this is to take off the hose on the supply side of the pump to allow the air to work it’s way out. One fix is to put in a tee and a valve so that air/water can be drained without undoing the pipe work. The second issue is that each aircon condenser tray has no effective drain. If we were ever to run the units for an extended time it would overflow. Onto the electric motor beneath. No good. It also reduces the effectiveness of dehumidifying the boat as the condensed water evaporates back into the interior of the boat.
After much leg work I have installed a drain on the port side and part of the airlock fix. I now need to drill holes and I can’t find the tool I need.
I’ll have to see if I can borrow one tonight. At thanksgiving dinner. Which reminds me ….
Happy Thanksgiving to all that this wish is relevant to on this day.
by steve, on November 23rd, 2010 ( New Zealand) We now have steering. I’ll give a full account of today’s efforts in my daily blog but for now here are some before and after pictures along with some descriptive commentary.
| Here is a picture of the original starboard pin, the one that didn’t break. Although the starboard pin had no requirement to be attached to an autopilot, it was identical reducing the number of distinct parts requiring fabrication. Had this been the port pin, the autopilot would be attached to the left end of the pin and held on with a washer and a cotter pin. The steering assembly fitted to the right of the fatter part (name??). A sleeve separated the steering assembly from the screw which screwed into the flange. Note how where the screw thread terminates, the pin is machined down to the inner diameter of the screw thread. |
Unbroken original pin
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Broken original pin
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So it’s no surprise that the pin failed at the point where it was the narrowest and where it attached to the flange. |
| Looking at the sheared off area you can just see an almost triangular area. This is the area that held on the longest. |
Larger segment of broken pin
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Screw end of failed pin
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Looking at the screw end of the pin the evidence of earlier cracking is more evident. The ‘polished’ areas of the failed pin evidence cracking that occurred at an earlier date that has since been ground smooth.
From this angle the diameter of the pin actually looks less than the minimum diameter of the screw thread. |
| Here are the old pin and the new pin along with all the additional pieces that go with them. Each pin screws into the flange and locked down with a washer and a nut (left of each pin).
The old pin then had a collar which went on the pin keeping the steering gear away from the flange. On the new pin this collar was integral to the pin and edges ground on to allow tightening.
The old pin had an integral section further down which on the new pin was replaced with a removable collar.
Finally, the old pin used a washer and a cotter pin to hold on the autopilot piston. On the new pin we have a washer and a locking nut. |
Old and new pin disassembled
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When loosely assembled the differences and similarities become more apparent. The specific improvements on the new pin are :-
- Larger diameter screw.
- Pin is turned down to the larger diameter of the screw thread, not the smaller.
- Enlarged segment positioned to sit against the flange to reduce stress at base of screw.
- In the unlikely event the pin shears in the same place, the autopilot and steering assembly will remained joined
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Old and new pin partially assembled
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| The sockets in the flanges needed to be enlarged to match the larger screw threads on the pins.
To accommodate the wider ‘neck’ of the screw, the thread at one end of the socket had to be removed. |
Rebored flange thread
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Partially assembled port flange and pin
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Here is one of the new pins screwed into the starboard flange. The top nut has yet to be tightened. |
| So here is the port pin fully assembled. Top to bottom are the nut, the flange (to the rudder post), the steering assembly going off to the right and the autopilot piston going off to the left. |
Port assembly
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Starboard Assembly
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The starboard pin has no autopilot. An additional sleeve (bottom) was required to hold up the steering assembly. |
So how do these solutions compare? The chances of the new pin shearing in the same place are somewhat remote as it has a larger diameter screw, the screw terminates with a fatter ‘neck’ and the enlarged piece separating the flange from the steering assembly is integral to the pin, not a movable collar. If the new screw does break, the autopilot and steering assembly will remain linked making a jury rig significantly simpler than before.
Replacing the cotter pin with a nut at the bottom became necessary as this hold all the pieces on. I remain a little concerned about how well this nut will stay on but the way this was engineered, the nut locks on tight so it shouldn’t move. I will inspect from time to time.
The new pin may now be over-engineered with respect to failure prevention but that suits us. A simpler, but perhaps biggest bang for the buck, improvement would have been to keep the original design and simply implement enhancement 2 – the larger ‘neck’ accompanied by grinding out part of the thread in the flange. The extra 2-3mm diameter on the pin would probably increase its strength by 50%.
Because the largest metal diameter on the old and new pins are identical, the is no additional source material required bar the construction of the additional sleeve on the starboard pin. Our new design there brings significant improvement in strength for a minimal addition in cost of source materials and labour. Were the simpler improvement mentioned above implemented only a fractional increase in labour costs be required (for grinding out a few millimeters of thread in the flange) be required to gain a reasonable improvement in strength and more importantly, improved vessel safety.
by steve, on November 23rd, 2010 ( New Zealand) Around 9:30am we set off to hike the coastal path from Opua to Paihia. We had certainly heard some good  recommendations about the hike from others and the weather looked great so off we went.
After a short walk along the road, the hike took us along a boardwalk which had been  put in place because the original path had crumbled. From there on the path was quite varied. A lot of it was a path cut into the size of the steep hillsides at the water’s edge. To keep our hearts going the path climbed and fell several times, often through thick wooded areas.
At one point we took a 5 minute diversion (not too popular with Helen) to climb up to a lookout point.  This was a little disappointing as we practically had to stand on each other’s shoulders to see over the bushes/trees that had grown up around the spot. Towards the end of the hike it was more walking  over beaches and rocks giving us a lot of variation in terrain.
Along the way we were offered excellent views of the area. See the slide show below for more pictures of this great hike.
Our main objective in Paihia was to set up a bank account. The first bank I tried didn’t have anyone in who was authorized to set up an account so we went to ANZ and were successful there.
After this we went for Fish n Chips on the water front followed by a beer. Having exhausted all our options, but not ourselves, we turned around and hiked all the way back. At 4-5 miles each way we got some decent exercise and a good warm up for some of the more serious hiking we have ahead of us.
The evening we spent in as we were quite worn out. I didn’t bother chasing our rudder pins, charger or car. I’ll leave all that for today.
Did a lot of running around yesterday but on reflection I managed to complete nothing. To that end I’ll claim completion (forgot to mention the previous day) of my effort to permanently plumb in the washing machine waste.
As part of the build of our enhanced rudder pins I removed my starboard flange and dropped it off so they could drill out a larger hole for the new pins. Hopefully these will be ready today.
There also may be a day or two delay with our new car as the NZ registration paperwork seems to be slowing down delivery. Our charger should be on it’s way here within a day or two.
We can now eat of the floor of the boat as Helen spent another day cleaning and sorting. Ben had a very productive session with a contact he has made in New York with respect to understanding more about starting work as an actuary including getting some hiring leads.
During one of my runaround sessions I took the camera out for some pics of the place. Enjoy.
Yesterday evening we dined with Ed/Cornelia from A Capella and Vickie/Steve from True Companions. We started off meeting up aboard Dignity for cocktails and starters before trudging all the way to the other end of Opua to True Companions for dinner and desert. Hardly needs to be said that we had a good time of it.
Today we’re going to walk to Paihia and set up a local bank account and eat out for lunch. If our news rudder pins are ready when we return I’ll sort that out so we are free to move.
by steve, on November 21st, 2010 ( New Zealand) BBQ night was again fun. For NZ$10 we got a decent meal, good company and were entered into a prize draw. The draw was set up so that almost every boat won something and some boats more than once. We did pretty good by winning an handheld VHF worth US$300. Not bad for a night out.
On Sunday we met Phil from “Cars for Cruisers” to test drive one of the vehicles he had. He was keen for us to try a few cars out so that with our feedback he’d know what to look for for us. In the end we only needed to drive one car. From this we were able to narrow down our needs. By the end of the day he’d drummed up a few possibilities and after a bit of googling we’d placed a deposit on a Toyota Will VA 1.8 VVT-i. A nippy little thing that will get us around and about and be fun to drive.
Helen spent a lot of day cleaning and sorting the interior making the forward starboard berth ready for Sam’s visit.
My main project of the day was to fix our shower sump. On the way down here it developed a fault such that once the drain pump came on, it wouldn’t stop. My early diagnosis was a control box problem. This was an easy fix as all I had to do was swap it with the one for the forward starboard shower which we currently use for storage. Once swapped the problem didn’t go away. After some more testing it appears the resistance on the water level reed switch when open has fallen so that it’s not enough to trigger the pump circuit but then fools the circuit to think there is still water there when there’s not. This turned out to be a much harder fix as I now had to open up both shower floors to get the sumps out and swap in the one from the starboard side. This necessitated my messing up the starboard shower/berth which Helen had made up so nicely. We now have a working shower but have left the task of finding a replacement float switch.
After two days of overcast skies the day finally brightened yesterday giving us brilliant blue skies. This was accompanied by some strong wind causing three boats in the anchorage to drag their anchors and forcing us to borrow a dinghy to put a line out to one of the pilings to prevent Dignity from banging into the dock.
Finally, Ben did make the national news in regards to the man overboard situation on “Wild Goose”. I don’t know how long this will be available but for now you can see us walking the dock and a snippet from the interview on this link.
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