Engines

When your antifouling paint arrives in plain-labelled cans marked “Experimental,” you’re going to get some suspicious looks from your boatyard neighbors. When I painted our 34ft project boat’s bottom with Interlux’s Pacifica Plus copper-free antifouling last spring, the product was so new the labels hadn’t even been printed, and it proved to be a bit of a conversation-starter in the

I’ll never forget the time I epoxied my wristwatch to my arm and shirt cuff. Oh, how I laughed—not. Then there was the time I neglected to clean resin off my hands before it kicked, and spent the next week walking around with flakes of it peeling off my skin like something out of the Mummy’s Revenge.My tales of woe are obviously not unusual, for WEST SYSTEM has just introduced a

When replacing the pressure water system on our project boat, we thought it would be fun to install a water heater. But where to put it? Like most early ’70s boats, our Norlin 34 lacks interior volume compared to modern boats. The need for the heater to be mounted below the engine’s heat exchanger (to prevent problems with coolant circulation) further complicated matters.The only logical

Before I laid the boat up, I had to replace a bilge pump that had mysteriously stopped working. This was a secondary pump, serving to keep the water out of a poorly drained part of the hull forward of the mast step. It was a good opportunity for a quick photo tutorial on connecting 12-volt wires together. Yes, this sounds remedial, but I have seen enough botched jobs on boats to know that you

Despite all the progress in sailing gear and equipment certain aspects of life at sea never change. Keeping water out, maintaining good boatspeed, preserving and conserving food stores, and carrying adequate spares for the inevitable failures that occur are all perennial priorities. Plus one more thing; having a good supply of fresh air below.Someone once observed that

Despite all the progress in sailing gear and equipment certain aspects of life at sea never change. Keeping water out, maintaining good boatspeed, preserving and conserving food stores, and carrying adequate spares for the inevitable failures that occur are all perennial priorities. Plus one more thing; having a good supply of fresh air below.Someone once observed that

The twin-lever engine control on our Norlin 34, Ostara, had been annoying me for as long as we’d had the boat. The detent was so worn that it was sometimes not possible to tell if you were in neutral or reverse gear. More than once I had been alerted by yells from the neighboring boats as Ostara sidled crablike around her mooring, pulled by the prop walk of

The twin-lever engine control on our Norlin 34, Ostara, had been annoying me for as long as we’d had the boat. The detent was so worn that it was sometimes not possible to tell if you were in neutral or reverse gear. More than once I had been alerted by yells from the neighboring boats as Ostara sidled crablike around her mooring, pulled by the prop walk of

As part of my hybrid propulsion research I have been looking carefully at large-capacity litihum-ion batteries as a possible energy source on modern cruising sailboats. Lithium-ion batteries are common in cell phones and laptops, but they are rarely used in higher capacity applications. This may rapidly change, because the hybrid automotive and electric vehicle markets are in desperate need of