My H42 is now 23 years old, and although I have updated just about everything- I am also finding occasional maintenance conundrums. A recent one that I thought I should list here is that I recently noticed an air bubble in the lens of my Ritchie compass.I went and Googled Ritchie and find they simply advise the compass needs to be returned to them for a rebuild- when I am in Australia and Ritchie are in your good old US of A , that it is not really viable, so I dug deeper. I found a thread on cruisers forum on this very issue.
To cut a long story short- the cause of my loss of fluid as the main "O" ring on the fill plug which had simply worn. Locating a replacement was easy and very cheap at my local hydraulics guy ( 10 cents!) I then went to the hardware store and found a bottle of refined mineral spirits ( Parafin in the old language) at a cost of some $6- in my case it was labeled "unscented lamp and torch oil"-so to be sure , I called the manufacturer to confirm it was indeed parafin, which it was. This is exactly what Ritchie used until around 2004, when they changed to isopropel. I simply set the compass on my bench with the fill plug facing up- which also brought the air bubble to the fill hole. I straightened out a paper clip and used a syringe (minus needle) to run the parafin down the paper clip into the fill hole. Once completely full , simply refit the fill plug with the new "O"ring and DONE! Although this is slow - it works!
I now have a "refurbished" Ritchie compass with NO air bubble and all at less than $10 and probably less than an hours work!
To cut a long story short- the cause of my loss of fluid as the main "O" ring on the fill plug which had simply worn. Locating a replacement was easy and very cheap at my local hydraulics guy ( 10 cents!) I then went to the hardware store and found a bottle of refined mineral spirits ( Parafin in the old language) at a cost of some $6- in my case it was labeled "unscented lamp and torch oil"-so to be sure , I called the manufacturer to confirm it was indeed parafin, which it was. This is exactly what Ritchie used until around 2004, when they changed to isopropel. I simply set the compass on my bench with the fill plug facing up- which also brought the air bubble to the fill hole. I straightened out a paper clip and used a syringe (minus needle) to run the parafin down the paper clip into the fill hole. Once completely full , simply refit the fill plug with the new "O"ring and DONE! Although this is slow - it works!
I now have a "refurbished" Ritchie compass with NO air bubble and all at less than $10 and probably less than an hours work!
