Category Archives: Projects

All the various things we’re doing to get Mahdee into shape

Autopilot and Other Fun Stuff

Posted on by under anchoring, Musings, Systems

Sometimes we’re as slow as molasses about the things we do!

Mahdee, with her double arm worm gear, is so easy to steer whether we’re motoring or sailing that the autopilot hasn’t really been…shall we say…a high priority.  However, David installed it in the spring of 2010 and we did use is to sit in the chart house out of the rain and steer (by remote control) during our trip down the coast from San Francisco in the fall of 2010.  Then, well, we’ve been busy with other things.  The compass didn’t seem to work well–always had a tendency to steer off to one side into a circle.  We finally did the legwork for troubleshooting.  There were great instructions on troubleshooting in the manual and the manufacturer was very helpful on the phone.  The problem was identified, the replacement part (under warranty) sent by the manufacturer and, yea! we’re in business.

We can now steer using the compass heading.  However, doing that, there’s like…nothing to do…we can sit around and twiddle our thumbs (or take up knitting) letting the autopilot do its thing.   However, that will be really good when we’re sailing shorthanded into an anchorage and taking down sails! Or, when reefing the main, etc.

When I returned from Washington, DC a couple weeks ago, I immediately picked up a nasty cold/flu. I really didn’t feel good.  I sat around and did no-brainer tasks like cleaning up my file system on the computer and avoided overtaxing myself.  Then, as I was feeling much better and rearing to go on projects…yep…David got the cold.  He seems to have a “lesser” version of it but he’s in the “do no-brainer tasks on the computer mode” which means….David just wrote a Python program for the little Nokia N810; the program is an anchor watch which sounds an alarm when our GPS sees that we’re outside of a desired circle of water.  This means that instead of me sleeping with the Nokia in front of my face in the bed…we’ll have it sitting nearby able to give us fair warning of dragging anchor.

Why is that I have little to show for my no-brainer stuff and David has a nice little application programmed up?  Clearly my “no-brainer” and his are on entirely different planes.

Three Things

Posted on by under interior, Weather, wildlife

There are three things I seem to write about:

1.  Pretty birds, starfish, wildlife

2.  Projects

3.  Howling winds

Today, we’ll talk about all three.  We’ve had more than our share of lovely days with nifty little birds hanging around the boat.  I’m sure they’re wanting to be fed (we never feed these birds) but, still, they’re so cute.  I rowed David and his bike to shore so he can meet up with a friend (at a mooring field a few miles away) to practice sailing the friend’s boat for an upcoming race.  All I can say is “yahoo, we won’t have to race OUR boat!” even while David gets his go-fast-and-heel-too-far-fix.  On the way back to the boat, I was surrounded by the little loon looking birdies.  They look like miniature loons and certainly dive like them too.

Once back on the boat, I got to work on my part of the settee project:  more paint and varnish.  I had the two large pieces of plywood that make up the underside of the port-side pilot berth outside for painting whilst I painted the bulkhead adjacent the berth.  All the mahogany has 3 coats of varnish (or is it 4?) and thus I’ve moved on to painting the adjacent surfaces.  Once I got the big sheets of 9mm plywood covered in paint and delicately balanced on little scraps of wood on the fore deck, the winds decided to start blowing very hard and I wondered if perhaps my plywood was going to fly away.  I couldn’t weight it down but I did angle it so the leading edge (towards the anchored front of the boat) was positioned on low blocks while the trailing edge was higher so the wind would hopefully push the plywood down rather than lift it up.  It seemed to work.

That wind did really howl though.  Later in the afternoon, while I was below decks I heard a sharp toot on an airhorn and thought that either there’s a race starting adjacent Mahdee or someone is signaling me.  I popped up on deck and found David and Don flying by Mahdee in the 40′ or so sail boat they’ll be racing next week.  As they spun circles around me, I asked what they were doing here in the quiet anchorage rather than out in the windier bay or even the ocean.  “Too windy” they said with grins plastered on their faces.  I’d swear they were drinking but know that Don doesn’t keep alcohol on the boat so I figured they were just drunk with the exhilarating winds of the day.

Last  night the winds died into a lovely calm but today they’ve whipped back up into a nice little torrent of noise in the rigging and slapping waves on the hull.  Too much wind to put another coat of paint on the plywood so I had to resort to other projects–paperwork this go ’round.

So, there we have it–cute birds, projects, and howling winds.

It’s all about Buttercup, really

Posted on by under car repairs, misc

The saga continues. Like her namesake, Buttercup, in the Princess Bride book and movie, our dear Buttercup has got to be the most self-centered entity we know. Buttercup to the rescue? Not. Sadly, she is incapable of helping out when help is needed.

We returned from DC, ready to take Wesley’s transmission out and up to Paul for another re-build. Oh, but we forgot that we’d actually have to count on Buttercup to, ah-hem…run properly. Sure enough, the bad clutch hydraulics problem seemed to be intermittently back. And, a quick look showed that it was the slave cylinder throwing out a little spurt of fluid every once in a while. Not the master cylinder. It seemed that Buttercup’s slave cylinder was bad even though it is brand new. I called Chip, a SAAB guru on the East coast to ask what he thinks of the problem. That was a big mistake. Living a couple hours North of Chip, when we were in DC, we used to buy parts from Chip all the time and always enjoyed his various car stories. I called Chip a couple months back when Buttercup was needing a (used) part as I searched across the country for a solution (blog post here) but he couldn’t help at that time.

I’d completely forgotten how Chip has a low regard for SAAB owners–thinks we’re all cheap and always short-cutting things. There could be nothing further from the truth with Buttercup and Wesley’s care, but, such is life and Chip’s opinions. He also has a chip on his shoulder (pun intended) about people getting advice from him but not purchasing parts via him. Since, in the past, we’ve purchased numerous parts via Chip–indeed entire parts cars!–I keep forgetting about this issue he has. I suppose he thinks “they’re across the country, they’re not going to buy anything from me.” I know for a fact that the man really doesn’t know how loyal we are to businesses that have supported us in the past.

Well, the important part of the call to Chip this Saturday morning went like this, Me: “have you ever heard of an intermittent slave cylinder problem when the cylinder is brand new?”
Chip: “you bought a cheap part from someone else and now you’re calling me for free advice?
I don’t appreciate it and you get what you pay for.”
Me: “do you have the part? Send it to me.”
Chip: “I’m busy, call me back next week.”

So much for calling Chip for help OR PARTS in the future. Geeze. I’d thought it was OEM…but I’d bought it from an online vendor, Pro-Tech and I could be wrong. Anyway, we bought a replacement cylinder from a local SAAB repair shop in San Diego and that shop’s owner confirmed that there were Italian-made slave cylinders out there in commerce that were faulty. However, if the casting had an “H” cast on it, it was OEM. Saturday David did a quick job of replacing the slave and rebuilding the master on Buttercup and…drum roll…it had an “H” in the casting. We’ll be returning this part for a refund since it should be a quality part. I feel like calling up Chip and saying “so there! I’m not as cheapy as you think I am!” But, rather, I suppose I’ll just leave him and his little neurosis about this matter alone. Everyone has their issues, after all.

Buttercup’s issue certainly seems to be that she absolutely MUST be the center of attention and care. After the clutch problem was all squared away, David pulled the engine out of Wesley in record time Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. However, we discovered that Buttercup has decided to have a little hissy fit and not run unless the hood is slightly ajar. Seriously. Luckily the SAAB hoods open backwards so there’s no risk of accidentally opening all the way while driving. It seems that something–likely the high tension wires going to the distributor–may have a short or some problem such that when the hood presses against them (as it does with those wires) they allow Buttercup to, not so gracefully, rather emphatically state “cough, cough, sputter, oh POOR me…I shall expire!” and then cease running. Lucky for us, we quickly figured it out while troubleshooting it Saturday evening on the drive to the boat from the hobby shop. Unlucky for us, we haven’t picked up a new set of wires to fix it. In the meanwhile, Buttercup just has to deal with being driven around with her hood ajar. Embarrassing, for us, of course. But, it allows Buttercup to think that she remains the center of attention–or so she thinks. Perhaps we’ll leave it that way for a while and she won’t try any further shenanigans.

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