Tag: Equipment
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Size does matter
The crazy Australians that built my hydraulic steering system had a tendency to super-size everything. Not a bad thing in a steering system actually. But the auto-pilot got super-sized too, and that was maybe not perfect. With the original pump the HO/HO time is about 2.5 seconds, which is waaay to fast. So I have…
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Fuel woes: Be gone!
I’ve had problems with the engine fuel on a few occasions, as the faithful readers of this blog will remember. Very annoying. It never happened in critical situations, though. But I don’t want to tempt fate… So I just finished putting together the new fuel filter system. Maybe it’s an overkill this time, but it…
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The product disappointments continue
I think I have enough trouble dealing with my own mistakes. But on top of that I have to deal with a multitude of standard products that fail. Here’s another one to add to the list: Today I was investigating a leak in one of the manual bilge pumps. It is less than two years…
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Fridge tune-up time.
Today was a day dedicated to the fridge and freezer. I had noticed that the fridge especially had very long run times, and was causing a bit of battery drain. When I had a look at it, the piping outside the actual fridge was covered in ice. This of course seemed a bit wrong, I…
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Dear Johnson Pumps, is it supposed to look like this?
Well now I know why the transom compartment bilge pump stopped working ;-) I guess the pump was not as watertight as it was supposed to be. Oh well…
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Things that went wrong and mistakes to learn from
It is now too late in the season to continue the journey south. So I am forced to rest a while, waiting until next spring to continue, sometime in September. One thing that I thought would be fun to do now that I have plenty of time is to write an entry listing some of…
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Admitting defeat.
I have previously written about my attempts to create a very energy efficient fridge and freezer. The idea was to integrate the hull as a heat exchanger in the compressor/evaporator circuit. I had some initial discussions with a cooling technician about this. However he was not very happy when he saw the actual installation. The…
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When it’s cloudy it’s usually windy…
The Journeyman is supposed to be powered only by the wind and the sun. (Except it has an engine of course, but we’re talking about when we are sailing her!) However my original ambitions that all electrical power was to come from the sun turns out to be a little optimistic. Especially when we are…
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Preparing for the fish
Lucas and I decided to get busy fixing the fishing rods, now that we are getting to waters where fishing starts to become fruitful. I hadn’t used them since my last long journey 11 years ago, so they needed a bit of care and grease, plus new lines, to get in shape. Now we are…
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Polishing some of the experiments
Many details on the Journeyman are experimental. Most are working very well, some not at all, and some need some refinement. I have written before about the de-bubbelizing tank that the Journeyman has in the salt water inlet. The pipe that lets out the air after it has been separated from the water used to…