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Hello Roger,
Your engine bed appears to me to be a modified original. Look mostly like mine. I can’t speak to the thin ness of the material where the vibration absorbers mount, but can say mine are probably around 3/16 inch and seem adequate for the job. As I said, mine looks mainly like yours, but not exactly. On mine, the entire bottom of the pan is cut out, presumably to make clearance for what I believe to be the skeg mount studs, which protrude vertically. The drawback of this arrangement is that oil that drips, inevitably, does not stay in the pan, but can drain to the bilge. I suspect someone modified yours to correct this deficiency. Just a guess. Perhaps some others on the forum can speak more intelligently to this…
David
Rob & Rob,
Good poop and thanks for the info and pics. Will definitely file this away for a potential future project.
One mod the PO accomplished which may be beneficial vis a vis hull flexing is an anchor locker project that essentially sealed off the anchor locker from the rest of the hull. Plywood was added and glassed in, in the anchor locker area.
I hope my wife doesn’t see Rob’s pretty wooden batts or I’ll be doing the project whether I want to or not!
David
Just my two cents here, but if you don’t have a problem with bow flexing you might hold off doing anything expensive to fix what may be a non-problem. I am 99% sure that ours has not been reinforced, as we bought from the original owner and had a thorough debrief on boat projects. Ours is hull #189, so perhaps structure was beefed up on the later boats. It has always been a salt water boat, primarily plying the waters off the East coast, to the Bahamas every year or so. We sail the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf stream to the Bahamas primarily and have been in moderately crappy stuff, with no signs of flexing or breakage.
David
Blue MoonYour cushions look great, Rich. Nice project.
A bit unrelated, but related to cockpit cushion foam material: We used what I think I remember as reticulated foam, and have been happy for years with the choice. Reticulated foam (if I have that term right) allows water to flow through. It resembles the foam pad on a large industrial floor polisher. Basically open cell. Anyway, saw it recommended in an article in one of the sailing mags years back and took heed. It doesn’t rot, dries easily, and has retained its shape well. Also it feels good under the arse. Ours are covered with fabric that came from the PO. Nice covers. But I didn’t like his foam. We keep the fabric coated with 303 after each washing.
David
Blue MoonRich, you probably have a Sherwood R30G-1 raw water pump. I don’t have the part number for the impeller itself right now, but it’s an easy matter to find it with the pump part number on-hand
David
Blue MoonHello Rob, Thanks for the response. Yes, it is entirely possible that I am losing fluid through the heat exchanger. I should have mentioned in my original post that I had the heat exchanger ‘rebuilt’. But it has been a couple of years. Thanks for the reminder. That is the next step I will take: Have the heat exchanger pressure checked.
David
The PO outfitted ours with a mid-ship ladder. Works pretty well, as the freeboard is quite a bit less mid-ship than at the transom. Maybe a little rougher in a running sea, as you are somewhat sheltered at the transom. A lot of our younger/or taller guests eschew the mid-ship ladder when they tie up mid-ship and merely step to the deck from their dinghy.
A major advantage of the midship ladder is it provides a way to get back on board should you fall in the water…but your dinghy is in the davits, blocking the transom ladder. This happened to a buddy of ours on an Irwin 37. He spent some time in the water till he could get some help. He since outfitted a rope ladder mid-ship for just such an emergency.
We improved the usability of our transom ladder by extending the offsets (all four of them) by a number of inches. This places the ladder further out and reduces the strain of climbing up a backwards angle. A big help for my wife.
David
Blue MoonOur original was 20X13, same as listed in the 424 sales brochure. I always had the impression we were somewhat over-propped. WOT gave us somewhat less than the spec 3000 RPM, and a lot of black smoke. We changed to a 18X11 flex o fold, and it seems to be about right. Certainly not too weak. However, I was cautioned by flex o fold to not compare their prop to other props vis a vis the diameter and pitch. No usable correlation.
Yes, I do have my original prop, but I am holding onto it in case I have a prop crisis in some remote location. Sorry can’t help there.
David
Blue MoonBlue Moon’s are angled. Don’t know to what degree. You might try Suncor or Whitewater for your bases. If all you can find are non-angled, and you want angled, you could always manufacture angled spacers out of ‘starboard’. Not too hard to do if you have a table saw and sabre saw and/or chop saw of some sort.
David
#189Hello Alan. Both of my compressors are installed in the space behind (aft of) the forward companionway stairs. Between the stairs and the head compartment. The space was appropriately vented for the compressors.
David
#189When I did mine (all of them), I too found less rot and damage than I expected, based on all the gel coat cracking. In my case, I ground out all the stanchion area glass and balsa down to the bottom layer of glass. Then built up with solid glass, finished, and ultimately refinished all the non-skid. Perhaps overkill on my part, but I wanted to get rid of all the visible cracks. Looks great now (did the job a couple of years ago)
Yes, I did find the stanchion bases not perfectly flat. Perhaps I took the easy way out, but I simply used 4000 or 4200 between the deck and the bottom of the stanchion base plate. Lightly torqued, then final torque after a few days. Looks good, no unsightly cracked rubber gasket sticking out, and apparently effective. No leaks after several years, and no deck/gel coat cracking. I suspect your butyl tape would work fine too.
I did replace the backing plates when I did the job. It was cheap and easy to use 3/16″ aluminum plate, with SS oversize washers. SS backing plates would be better, but there you have it. I think it is better than what was there when the boat left the factory.
David
Blue Moon, #189I may have an interest in the injection pump, if available. Ours just started leaking and still looking at our options; rebuild the current one, at a cost of about $1k, maybe fix the leak without even removing the pump (I am doubtful, but my motor expert wants to have a look), or purchase a used injection pump in good working order. Any thoughts appreciated…
David
Blue Moon, #189You are probably just fine. When we painted Blue Moon, it also showed more flaws due to gloss…not a lot you can do about that.
Our boats, as pretty much all fiberglass boats built during the eighties, employed hard bulkheads, butted directly against the inside of the hull, then glassed in place. Over time, this causes a hard spot to telegraph through the hull and be apparent on the outside. Normally not an issue, I was told by a surveyor. Primarily a cosmetic problem. I suppose that if the hull glass was broken, it could be a problem, but that is pretty severe and normally not the case.
I am told that nowadays boats are constructed with a foam layer between the bulkhead and the inside of the hull. Then the tabbing takes place, spanning the space taken up by the foam. The tabbing adheres the bulkhead to the boat hull, as well as spreading the load out much further than is the case with our older boats. Supposedly this diminishes or eliminates the ‘hard spot’ problem you are seeing.
David
Blue Moon, #189Ours is a 12K as well, located under the aft bunk. I think our install is unique in that the compressor unit pumps coolant to two air handlers, one in the aft cabin and one in the main cabin. No necessity to run ductwork. The forward cabin and head compartment get nothing, though the forward cabin cools nicely (at night) if we place a fan at the doorway to the compartment, blowing main cabin air forward.
The system works very well at night, not so much during hot Florida days, but much, much better than nothing. We have an arched awning we built for the deck, over the boom, and that improves matters a lot! We can maintain 80 or 82 in main cabin on hot days, and if we were ever to get desperate, we could close off the aft cabin and live in there. With it’s dedicated air handler, it cools well in the hottest of conditions.
David
Blue Moon, #1891 user thanked author for this post.
Sorry Effie, just saw your query from Oct. To answer your question, ours is an Isotemp Basic, 6 gallon. I can generally get cool water plenty warm for two showers in about 40 minutes, burning about 70 to 80 amps, or around 45 amp hours. If the wind is up and the batteries are topped its a good way to use excess available power. If the renewables are just keeping up with normal demand, I can run the engine for a bit, making hot water with both the inverter and the heat exchanger function from engine coolant. Works pretty well, though I will often run the engine with a bit of load on it, in reverse, to bring the heat up.
David
