Tag: Steering
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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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Noise from the rudders are not good…
Right now the forecast is for zero wind the next two days and then too much wind… So we’re doing some fixing work while waiting. On the last leg there was some noise from the rudders, which is of course not very good to hear when you are on a long crossing. We did an…
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After major cabling work, we have an autopilot!
This took a lot longer than I expected it to. The autopilot is connected to almost every corner of the boat! One sensor on the targa, one sensor, pump and control unit in the transom, both the NMEA0183 and the NMEA2000 instrumentation buses, control panel in the cockpit, follow-up remote at the nav station, and…
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Fixing annoyances – big and small.
Today I got rid of a couple of things that have annoyed me for some time.Actually, I have a list of about 60 of these. And the only way of making the list smaller is fixing them…. A small annoyance was that the starboard side helmsman seat would gather a small pool of water on…
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Getting the steering back on track… almost.
The steering problem that hit us during the trip from Västervik to Stockholm was quite simple. (Everything is once you know it, right?) The installation instructions clearly tell you to put a cap with a breader hole in the filling port of the steering pumps. But I have two steering pumps, and two breather holes…
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More steering, plus a solution.
So this is what the steering position looks like. In the picture you can also see the now solved winch collision problem. You can also see the steering control valve I talked about in yesterdays post, it’s the small silvery handle to the right of the wheel center. You can see two joysticks on the…
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Happy Helmsman
So we finished the steering today. I had at least 2 months of e-mail arguments with the folks at HyDrive in Australia before they agreed to make a steering system according to my specifications. In the end they were kind of intrigued by my ideas, and actually built a prototype system in their factory before…
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Steering work
Do you remember this picture? It was a little tricky designing the dimensions for the steering, without having the rudders in place. There is basically no straight surfaces anywhere to measure from… However, it seems that we were reasonably successful. Some angles are not 100% optimal, but this will not be noticeable in real life.…
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Rudders sink
Rudders are in. They fit nicely… almost. Some small mod may be needed due to the bottom shape being a bit deformed. As you can see the team ended up building a ramp instead of digging a hole for the rudder mounting. The first interior module has also been fixed in place, the famous galley…
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Lots of Work-In-Progress…
The last 40 hours I have been sleeping three times, between 3 and 1 hour each time. This makes life slightly weird before you’re used to it. It’s just like starting an ocean crossing and going on a very irregular watch schedule! Today’s best news is that the rudder bearing problem is solved, thanks to…