Work Sign Off

I described earlier how we discovered that the Autohelm self steering was faulty when we attempted our sea trial. At 8 AM the next morning Alex was knocking on our cabin top with a new replacement Autohelm linear drive. Although the replacement unit was remarkably similar in gross terms the footprint of one of the mounting brackets was different enough spur Alex come up with a creative modification. A few hours later the unit was in and working.

Yesterday morning (Thurs the 18th) we took the boat out on an abbreviated sea trial consisting 30 minutes of working the helm hard and trying the Autopilot. During this trial Arnold discovered that the 160-amp alternator was not putting out any current. We returned to the pen and removed the covers of the engine and the regulator. The engine side looked OK (e.g. Belts working OK) but the regulator was reporting no input via its lights. Battery voltage was at 12.7V which should have triggered the alternator to start working.

Within 15 minutes Bruce was on board and of course everything worked perfectly when he started the engine. He looked hard but could find nothing wrong and told us to call him if it happened again. After he went away I went through the exact same starting sequence that I had used before to start the engine, including switching on the Autohelm and Instruments breakers. Once again we had the charging problem. We left the engine running and I saw Bruce who soon came on board and started looking.

The problem was simple and here is my understanding of it. The charging will not start until the oil pressure reaches a certain point. This is to ensure that the engine is running before the system is activated. But it works only if you start the engine using the master key at the navigation table. I was using the switch at the cockpit to start the engine which bypassed this oil pressure setup. After some discussion I described it as a feature because as Arnold had pointed out, we now had a way of de-activating the field on the big alternator in case we needed every ounce of power that the engine could deliver to drive the boat.

While in the pen I dropped the anchor and retrieved it several times using the electric anchor winch and that performed OK.

I signed off on the electrical and mechanical work.