Welding has been done. Spent a fair bit of time disconnecting the solar panels and bimini lighting cable and drawing them up the inside of the pole they run down leaving a sacrificial cable in their place. Didn’t want them damaged by the welding. Once the welding was done I had to reverse the process. It’s a bloody awkward place to work in the boat but helped by the fact the motors are not yet installed. The place where we had the visible crack was drilled before welding to prevent the crack from spreading. All good for our peace of mind.<\/p>\n

Helen had a very busy day. We have four patches under the boat now where the old shafts came out and the supports used to be. They’ve all been filled and glassed over. Helen applied the first coat of primer to these four patches. She spent the rest of the day helping to remove the caulking around the forward windows. A very time consuming job.<\/p>\n

I fired up the soldering iron and replaced the rechargeable batteries in the autopilot remote. When that was all done I reconnected and tested. Things seemed ok for a couple of minutes then the autopilot alarm went off saying the autopilot was off line. As everything has been touched we all had a bit of a panic tracing the problem as it could be anywhere. It turned out the wire that connects to the autopilot remote had some damage and was shorting everything. Fortunately I had a spare Sea-Talk (propriety Raymarine network) cable and was able to make up a replacement.<\/p>\n

With my soldering iron I also tried to fix the connector for Helen’s laptop charger. Turned out I really need a new connector so that’s now on the things to find in Whangarei list.<\/p>\n

The rest of the day I spent on the back of the new nav station panel beginning the wiring of the various GPS cables\/devices into the rotary switch so that I can switch between sources into my serial cable and the two radios for their distress beacons. Unfortunately some of the parts ordered the previous day to finish this work hadn’t arrived so this is still not over. More ominously a simple test between the chart plotter and VHF radio failed to register a GPS signal. It wasn’t a good test so the way I did it may have been the problem. I now rather regret not writing down all the wiring connections I’d deduced the first time I did all this. Oh well. Lesson learned.<\/p>\n

Oh – and the SSB control head and speaker are now both glued on and connected up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welding has been done. Spent a fair bit of time disconnecting the solar panels and bimini lighting cable and drawing them up the inside of the pole they run down leaving a sacrificial cable in their place. Didn’t want them damaged by the welding. Once the welding was done I had to reverse the process. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-zealand","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5428,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426\/revisions\/5428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}