C-27 Refit/Refurb

[paphman]

Phil,

Thanks for your answer. I have raised the till to the correct height by making a small wedge from king starboard, and putting it under the tiller where it rests on the rudder stock. This brings the tiller to the correct height when the autopilot is mounted on the coaming. We purchased the extentions for the arm of the pilot to extend the correct distance to the tiller. My concern was drilling the brass bushing at the correct angle so it will be vertical and perpendicular to the pin on the bottom of the pilot. I am not sure how critical this is. What is your feeling about this. Thanks Phil

Dale

 

[Stu Jackson]

...went and looked and cannot find the pic, so I drew the attached image qucikly. The attached drawign to me seems ideal, as the tiller pilot connects to its dedicated arm, rather than to the tiller you use. YOu can use the long tiller, yet swing it out of the way and the TP can still do its work.

On our C25 we bought a bracket (old "Autohelm" pre-Raymarine bracket used with a Navico Tiller-pilot) that installed on the BOTTOM of the wooden tiller. When in port, just moved the tiller over to one side or another.

 

[philwsailz]

...went and looked and cannot find the pic, so I drew the attached image qucikly. The attached drawign to me seems ideal, as the tiller pilot connects to its dedicated arm, rather than to the tiller you use. YOu can use the long tiller, yet swing it out of the way and the TP can still do its work.

On our C25 we bought a bracket (old "Autohelm" pre-Raymarine bracket used with a Navico Tiller-pilot) that installed on the BOTTOM of the wooden tiller. When in port, just moved the tiller over to one side or another.

Done right, the device I drew should allow the tiller to be swung up and out of the way even while underway, making for a much more comfortable cockpit for guests out on a "cocktail" cruise... The tiller pilot would still be functioning on its own little short tiller.

 

[philwsailz]

Quick Update on upgrades:

I have been working on many different things, all with little visible progress. I did manage to get some electrical work done that is, (almost) picture worthy. Some previous owner had completely removed any and all battery trays and/or battery fastening in the aft dinette seat base. I managed to get a sturdy FLAT plywood base installed back in there.

Once secured I firmly attached two large battery boxes, and installed a pair of Wal Mart's big Group 29 marine batteries. Between them in teh plywood base is a reach hole / access hole to the primary power wiring. Both batteris are connected to a Blue Sea Systems 7610 ACR, and a ProSport dual bank charger. The ACR has starter interrupt to prevent the batteries from being in parallel while cranking but when a charge voltge is present, both batteries charge. Then with no charging voltage they are isolated. The starter circuit can select from either HOUSE or CRANKING, but the audio equipmentand lighting is isolated to HOUSE. I can run the HOUSE bank down, and still crank the motor to get juice running from the alternator again, if ever it becomes necessary.

Wiring still needs to be bundles, zipped, loomed and tied up, but here are a fwe shots of the isntallation as it is at the moment. PLEASE disregard the spaghetti mess in teh background; it is soon to be tightened and cleaned up!

 

[philwsailz]

We've got Surround Sound

No pictures of this, it would be hard to take a picture anyway... Last night I went in and clipped the interior/cabin speaker wires off the back of the Sony radio and installed an amplifier.

The particular amplifier I am using is pretty neat, as it has a full DSP front-end, programmable by way of an RS232 cable. It has a power output of up to 46 watts x 4 at 2-ohms, (Maine, it is RMS power!) with an additional 100 watt subwoofer section. Trick is, you need to provide a 1-ohm load to get that much power out of it. The amp is hovering at around 90% efficiency, so very little heat is being given off during operation. It has a peak current draw of just under 30 amps and has a normal average draw of only 5 amps at normal(?) listening levels.

Back to the DSP. With the computer connected, I can go in and tweak a lot of paramemters for each of the five channels... gain, compression, crossovers, crossover slope, delay, channel mixiing, two different sets of EQ, what have I missed?

Anyway, I took advantage of some very basic surround sound theory, specifically that rear information is largely encoded in a "left-minus-right" and "right-minus-left" manner. For the rear speakers, I employed this basic technique to remove all center channel information, leaving only ambient information and steering cues intended by the surround-sound mixing engineer. The result is pretty convincing. While it is not Dolby Pr-Logic, or any of the other newer surround sound technologies, all of them are based upon this fundamental method of rear-decoding and it works pretty good. It also is MUCH better suited to music where you still want a stereo image, as opposed to "all center speaker, all the time" way many surround systems treat music.

I will be adding a subwoofer... I have the actual woofer in the shop now, I just need to build a sealed enclosure for it and get it wired in. It is an 8" unit, and will probably go in the forward dinette seat base. The enclosure needs to only be about a half-cubic foot, and it will mount inside the dinette seat up against one of the seat base walls, with the woofer firing into the listening area.

I took advantage of the radio's fader control in all of this. It is easy to fade back so that only the cockpit speakers are playing, or I can fade all forward, so that only the surround sound cabin system is playing. I can also set them both at a comfortable mix of front to back, so that there is sound everywhere.


After all of this, we will probably never watch TV or movies, instead just using the stereo for music, but it is fun, and helps me keep my job a hobby, so I do it... Pics soon hopefully, once I get everyting tightened up.

 

[philwsailz]

Got the subwoofer installed and powered up last night. It is a Kicker CVR8, with dual 2-ohm voice coils. I wired the coils in parallel for a 1-ohm load, perfect for the amp.

The enclosure is built from void-free 1/2" plywood, and is simply glued and bradded together. It has an interior volume of .56 cu. ft. and is sealed, so I did not have to mess with port calculations and resonance testing. The listening environment suggested a sealed enclosure would work bettter anyway.

The system was installed in the forward dinette seat base, firing out the side, towards the port settee. 4 screws hold the plywood enclosure to the seat base, and then 8 screws further hold the woofer and sandwich the whole thig together. I used Maine Sail's butyl tape as a gasket material to seal between the enclosure and the raw glass inside the seat base.

This afternoon, I am going ot go get enough proper stainless screws to properly installl the woofer and the grill which mounts over the top of the woofer with the same screws.

Programming the subwoofer took a while. It is easy to go over-the-top with all sorts of boom and bombast when installing subs to an audio system. I think I finally got to the point where the bottom two octaves are being faithfully reproduced, but at a level that balances well with the rest of the speakers. At one point, the system was so seamless I had to check to make sure the subwoofer was still on, quickly turning the subwoofer off, just to make sure it was still working. It was at this point I decided I was close, as when ti was off, the bottom of the music just fell away, but with it, the thing just sort of woke up and got bigger if you can grasp that bad analogy...



This is not much of a picture, but it is a picture nonetheless.

 

[Stu Jackson]

Phil, I added a powered subwoofer to our down below music system two years ago. What a difference. While not as sophisticated as yours, we just had some inexpensive Radio Shack speakers. Having a bottom end added is very worth doing. TV on a boat? What's that?!?

 

[philwsailz]

Phil, I added a powered subwoofer to our down below music system two years ago. What a difference. While not as sophisticated as yours, we just had some inexpensive Radio Shack speakers. Having a bottom end added is very worth doing. TV on a boat? What's that?!?

Hah, can you say 3 group 29's just for the house, for a boat that is plugged in almost every evening, (fresh water lake sailor)? It gets worse though Stu...


I work with a company that specializes in show parts for other "toys" of discretionary income. One of their products is an L.E.D color-changing lighting system. I was studying the lights at a show where I was working with them, and we decided they might work out kinda neat in a boat interior. SO..... Let the experiment begin.

Friday night I installled several of two differing lengths of their LED lighting fixtures throughout the cabin, from the v-berth back to the companionway. The lights will change between 7 different colors, either locking in one color at a time, or fading between colors with an adjustable fade rate.

The effect is stunning. I wish I could post the video I took... The red color will be good for night sailing to retain night vision at the helm while providing enough light for moving about below. There is a "white" that paints the interior with enough light to see clearly, just short of reading intensity. there is green, purple, two shades of blue...

The lights are so low current draw that they run on 4 conductor phone cord.... This will be a very energy - efficient lighting scheme for most needs.

Here is a very low-fi YouTube vido of the interior lighting. The color fade speed is set VERY fast, so that you can see the color changing quickly.

In the meantime, know it is getting down to play work and cosmetic work... My punchlist for spring launch is largely done. At this point, I am just waiting for some water in the form of spring rains to re-fill our lake.

Cheers-

 

[philwsailz]

Got some plexiglass cut for the sliding cupboard adjacent to the dinette, and for the overhead cupboard that goes over the galley, AKA the instruments cover... Forgive me for the poor pictures, I must have had some greasy stuff over the camera lense on my phone... The new black plexi looks SO much more modern than the old pebble-grained brittle plastic that was there in the dinette cupboard.

I also fabbed up and started glassing in the new icebox for under the galley. Despite appearig pretty tight with the potential for being too small, it seems that there is much more space than I anticipated. There is a good amount of volume, and this should do plenty fine for a weekend or a day sail. The icebox is formed up of glued and bradded 1/2" void-free plywood. The interior got two layers of cloth all over, overlapping at the corner seams. I need to sand it down smooth, add some fillets in the corners with thickened epoxy mixed with chopped fibers, and then consider spraying the gel in. I have a buddy who can spray gel, so hopefully it will turn out quite smooth. Prior to gelling though, I need to drilll, back fill, and redrill, then fit a proper drain.

Due to the lowered galley surface, the sink and the ice box are quie low compared to the waterline, so they will drain into a sump, and I will use a pump on a float switch to pump the drain water up and over a vented loop, prior to exiting out the galley drain thru hull.

 

[shipwreck66]

Phil, I haven't been keeping up with your project like I should, but, great minds think alike plays in here. Back around Christmas I added a third battery, a Group 31, isolated from the house bank, but hooked to a 750 watt inverter. When we pull out from dock I plug the dock pigtail into the inverter and all the house 110 plugs are hot again, never again relying on rechargable this or that or batteries rolling around in boat. We have a 15 in LCD TV ,fans, minifridge, radio, lights, etc. and never worry about starting power for the motor or running lights, bilge pump. I would like some good pics of the storage area behind the setees, I've always thought that was wasted space, I'm thinking two shelves with sliding doors and that sounds like what you are doing.

 

[philwsailz]

More update on the galley ice box. I finally got enough 'glass laid up to be comfy with it. Filleted the corners and applied one last coat of epoxy. Yesterday, a buddy dropped by and sprayed the white liner. We were looking at gelcoat, but the new Low-VOC gels are harder to work with, so we used a plasticized catalized exterior finish system. One could probably use a white bed liner material as well, but I like how this looks.

See pics

 

[Stu Jackson]

Nice, also you must have been busy, it's been awhile since your last post. How ya gonna insulate it?

 

[philwsailz]

Nice, also you must have been busy, it's been awhile since your last post. How ya gonna insulate it?

Hey Stu-

'Been travelling a lot with work lately, and have had to juggle some time out at the lake doing some dock and deck maintenance. We are 4 ft down and while it is borderline unsafe to be out on the water due to submerged structure it is a good time to be working on stuff that is normally in the water.

This is turning into sort of a jigsaw puzzle, and the parts all have to go in place just right for it to work. I will probably be in the port lazz contorting like a circus performer reaching in and under there to get it all hooked up. Then a trip to a massage therapist to work the kinks out...

That being said, it appears that the sink, the ice box and all of the rest of the parts will be assembled out of the boat, with only the plumbing left to connect. With that in mind, I think I am going to use either rigid foam, gluing it in place, or may consider even using some foam-in-place two-part goop. I have not fully researched it, so do you have any tips?

I don't want to close it off so much accidentally with the foam-in-place stuff that I lose access to the plumbing, so I might figure that out after the sink and icebox are firmly attached to the base cabinet and countertop.

 

[philwsailz]

I hope to have the galley/wet bar largely installed prior to Friday. I have that massage appointent already scheduled...

 

[philwsailz]

Nice, also you must have been busy, it's been awhile since your last post. How ya gonna insulate it?

I figured out the answer last night. It dawned on my I had some nice 1" insulating foam lying around, (a full sheet) and some of that expanding spray foam stuff. Recalling how tenaciously it stuck to my fingers and work surfaces ona previous project, I ratioalized that the foam would work as a pretty good adhesive...

SO... See pics, but know I have two and three layers of foam insulation on the outside of the icebox, with expanding foam in the cracks and voids. I am really committed at this point, as the fasteners for the ice box are now quite buried under a thick sandwich of foam and well, foam.

This actually worked out quite well. I Will go use my electric knife to carve away any excess expansion this eve, and then I am going to pre-plumb everything so I only have a drain hose and a supply hose dangling from teh back of the assembly.

I do know I will be using block and tackle to get the galley/wetbar back into the boat. It is as heavy as the original larger one I think!

 

[philwsailz]

Last coat of varnish went on the galley/wetbar last night. The drain plumbing is tied together and the sink supply is ready to be connected.

Stu, I know we have gone back and forth over drain issues on this one, but I think the obvious answer for this boat is obvious, if you study the boat in person....

I have a bilge pump under the motor, with a dam of sorts, (someone apparaently had a water issue in the engine compartment historically) that defines a pretty good reservoir....

I am going to start out with my ice box and sink just draining into the area just under the motor, and let that pump take care of getting the melt and sink contents off the boat. If needed, I will add a dedicated sump and pump with a vented loop for the sink and ice box later. The seacock under the galley/wetbar can just be left closed, and I am going to put a short length of hose and a plug on it just to prevent an accident... Or, I will re-plumb that pump to the seacock under the galley. I have a vented loop lying, so I have the necessary stuff to do it. That will eliminate the head pressure and pipe loss associated with the lift to the transom drain, and it will keep sink effluent from staining the transom gel....

Thoughts Stu? Let me know-

 

[Stu Jackson]

Phil, sorry, but I advise against draining your fridge into any kind of bilge area. So does Peggie Hall. Many older boats did that, and it turns out that even though you may think that water is "fresh" it isn't. The "goal" of almost every boater is a dry bilge (many of us can't quite get there yet, for various reasons). While I have a fridge in our icebox, I capped the drain line. Many older C30s still go to the bilge. I urge you to reconsider (I know, my ideas, your work), but still...

It really is looking good and that insulation is fantastic. I'll plumb your drain if you come insulate my icebox!

 

[philwsailz]

Phil, sorry, but I advise against draining your fridge into any kind of bilge area. So does Peggie Hall. Many older boats did that, and it turns out that even though you may think that water is "fresh" it isn't. The "goal" of almost every boater is a dry bilge (many of us can't quite get there yet, for various reasons). While I have a fridge in our icebox, I capped the drain line. Many older C30s still go to the bilge. I urge you to reconsider (I know, my ideas, your work), but still...

It really is looking good and that insulation is fantastic. I'll plumb your drain if you come insulate my icebox!

Grrr.... You are gonna make me build another 'glas box as a sump vessel.... I am not real comfortable with how low the sink is now that I lowered the countertop there....

 

[Stu Jackson]

Yup, if the sink is below the water line, I think we can agree that it won't drain by gravity...

 

[philwsailz]

Yup, if the sink is below the water line, I think we can agree that it won't drain by gravity...

It is finally raining here today, (I washed my truck on purpose this morning, just to encourage it) and I am hoping to get some water levels back to normal so I can launch some time this summer. I realize some things can be done when on the water, so I am focusing on getting her ready to spash. If I try to fix everyting prior it might be next year, (and it might be next year anyway if we don't get more rain). To that point, having a fresh water supply is a priority, but having the perfect way to get the melt water off the boat might not be. I know that the sump and pump is the ideal scenario though, so I may just start building that vessel.... If I go this route, the sump will be under the access board underneath the port lazz.