The Arctic Tern Project

Volume 6                           Issue No. 11                      November 2009

Click here to return to Boat Project Page.

Back Inside

Ok, last month I got the rubrails and toerails glued down and plugged.  This month I spent a fair bit of time chin scratching about electrics, wire routing, motor mounting, etc.

Toerails and Rubrails Continued

Ok, the toerails and rubrails were glued down and plugged.  The plugs were trimmed off and the rubrail sanded smooth.  The next step was to sand the toerail to get the top and bottom layers to be as one with each other.  Last month I spent a fair bit of fiddly time with the router to get the top and bottom layers of the toerail matched up.  This month that time investment paid off with only a moderate amount of sanding required to get things totally good.

 

 

The next step before epoxy coating would be to make the cut-outs for the in-the-rail chocks.  The only problem was I hadn’t cast them yet.  My buddy Quill, who has the casting equipment, has been working seven day shifts at the Shipyard so it’s difficult for us to coordinate.  I did, however, finish off the patterns with a bunch of coats of primer.

 

Ok, so I decided to leave the toerails and rubrails “as-is” for the moment and turn my attentions, once again, to electrical matters.

Electrics

I’d slowly, but surely, been getting my mind around “electrics” and how it was all going to work on this boat.  Initially, I felt as though I had some sort of learning-disability but I think it’s starting to make sense.  For a simple DC electrical system on a small boat like this the juice from the battery goes to a master “on-off” switch and then to a fuse panel (also known as a “distribution panel”) where it’s distributed via “circuits” to the various electrical appliances, lights, etc.  Now I know I have a tendency to make things more difficult than they need to be but I was already running into a roadblock.  The fuse panel was bugging me.  Typically, these have rocker or toggle switches for each of the circuits along with a fuse for each.  What was bugging me was that they are quite bulky; the cheap ones are kinda crappy (the panel on my first sailboat used to spit out those tube fuses on a regular basis); the good ones are expensive; they usually only support a maximum of six circuits; and the switches are redundant in a lot of cases (why have a switch on the circuit when there’s a switch on the VHF?).  Now, six circuits sound like a lot but all my navigation lights are going to be on the mast and  I need switches for Anchor Light, Tri-colour Light, Steaming Light, and Foredeck Light.  That’s four switches.  So, if I wanted to use the distribution panel as a way of switching these lights then I’d already have used up four of the six circuits available just on my mast lights!  Also, who wants to dive below to turn on their nav lights when single-handing in a blow?  Since everything else in the boat will have its own switch I decided to separate the distribution and fusing from the switching.  Bluesea Systems has a nice DC distribution/fuse-panel with no switches.  It’s compact, well-made, supports 12 circuits, uses automotive fuses, and costs less than half as much as a good 6 circuit panel with switches.

 

Ok, that made sense.  Now I needed a four-switch panel for the nav lights that I could mount in the cockpit.  Since nothing suitable seemed to be available I decided to make my own using booted toggle switches and an aluminum plate.

 

There we go.  Nice easy access.  Makes sense.

 

I cut the back out using a template and a router.

 

The backs of the toggle switches will poke through to a cabinet under the bridge-deck that will hide the backs of the rest of the instruments and house the DC distribution panel/fuse block and main battery switch.

 

Here’s the cabinet all made up (like magic!).

 

 

Ok, the cabinet did not spontaneously spring to life on its own accord.  I spent a lot of time figuring, designing, chin-scratching, and finally, building.  I just didn’t take any pictures (I was in the zone).  Despite all the chin scratching, I realized, after the cabinet was built and it was time to figure out how the route the wires, that having the fuse block horizontal rather than vertical would make routing the wire much more difficult.  Initially, the horizontal orientation seemed to make sense as a more efficient use of space but from a wire-routing perspective, it sucked.

 

 

But, guess what?  The cabinet was ½” too small to fit the fuse block in the vertical orientation without bumping into the toggle switches.  Oh, crap.  Ok, so I spent a day figuring out how to fix this without throwing out the cabinet.  I finally decided to simply move the cabinet down three quarters of an inch by putting spacer piece at the top.

 

Here it is before…

 

And here it is after…

 

Ok, not bad.  I even think it looks better.  But now my cut-out for the mahogany moulding was too big (you can just see it at the middle-right in the above photo) so I did end up having to re-do the side pieces of the cabinet (no big deal since it was all dry-fit).

 

 

It’s all good now.  Next step is to bring all the wires into this box for distribution.

The Motor

Ok, while all this electrical work was going on I was also thinking about the electric motor I had from Torqeedo.  Again, just to make things difficult for myself, I wasn’t satisfied with simply bolting the damn thing on like any normal human being.  Too ugly and inconvenient to use, so I’ve been hatching a plan to dismember the motor and use the pieces in some uniquely “me” configuration.  I’m hoping to have just the lower part of the shaft attached to the transom with the rest of the electronics, etc. mounted inside a cockpit locker.  After numerous emails back and forth with the Torqeedo service rep. I finally got it apart to this stage:

 

Now I’ve just got to figure out how to get the two parts of the shaft extrusion apart.  More badgering of the Torqeedo rep. got me some grudgingly served up info that may be enough to make it happen.  I know I can do it with a hacksaw but I’d like to be able to return it to original configuration if desired.  We’ll see.  Oh yeah, before I started dismembering this thing I thought it would be wise to fire it up just to make sure I was starting with a working example.

 

Lots of thrust.  I couldn’t get it past about 1/8 throttle for fear of it ripping itself off the workbench.

Next Time

More electrics, more motor dismembering.