Battery Intalled

After returning with a 2-week bird survey expedition to the Great Western Woodlands I continued my effort to install the new starter battery.

Battery Job Finished

The photo above shows the end result.  The two gel batteries are back in the upper position, with posts and connectors clean.  Below is the single new starter battery, with wooden spacers on its left to fill in the void left from what previously a second starter battery.

Dead Starter Batteries

Terminals in Need of Cleaning

The battery setup goes back to Opua, New Zealand, in 2008.  We had departed from Fremantle in May with only three batteries, two sealed Delkor N120 800 CCA calcium sealed batteries, one each for the starter and house banks, and one deep cycle lead acid battery for the house.  This turned out to be woefully inadequate.  Night after night when crossing the Tasman Sea the gas detector would begin chirping at around midnight due to low voltage and at dawn the house bank would be down to as low as 10.5 V.


In NZ a consultant was brought in and the result was a house bank with 4 x Commander GDC232 230 a/h gel batteries and a starter bank with both of the Delkor batteries.  The mechanics were brilliant in their installation of the Gel batteries: two on a shelf above the starter batteries and one on each side of the cabin, below the seats.  This resulted  in excellent weight distribution, all below the waterline.

New Battery with Spacers at Left

The starter bank failed during the recent Bunbury Cruise so I removed them and had them tested by Battery World, which pronounced them well beyond dead.  (The worse battery held a CCA of less than 10.) The decision was to install one replacement starter battery, a Century N120 MF with 900 CCA and dimensions identical to the replaced Delkors.  It is a sealed battery frequently used for starting heavy industrial equipment.

I began the replacement project by making what turned out to be a big mistake:  I removed the Gel batteries from the upper shelf before extricating the ailing starter batteries below.

Gel Batteries to be Lifted

I began the installation with two wooden spacers on hand to take up these space of the second battery.  That went OK but as I expected, lifting the 65 kg gel batteries back into  position was beyond my capability, given that I had endured two weeks of back pain after removing the dead starter batteries.  The problem was made worse by the fact that correct lifting posture was impossible in the confined space.  I spent literally hours cleaning battery terminals and connectors while ruminating on what to do.  (Everything was so corroded that it's a wonder that I got any power at all.)

I finally got the bright idea of contacting Kim Jamieson,  the man who seems to do most of the pen rope work around the club.  Jim agreed to help and on the day I had a vast array of wooden blocks, planks, and even two car jacks to assist us in making the lifts without straining our backs.  Kim eventually did it his way, with a combination of good technique, various planks and blocks, and muscle grunt work.  (Thank you Kim!)

Then I stepped back and saw that I could have left the upper gel batteries and place and simply slid out the starter batteries below.  (DUH! You live and learn.)

Below the Cockpit

While the batteries were out I  took a photo of the below-cockpit space.

To the left is the  multi-layered copper strap connecting the Dynaplate outside of the hull to the HF radio tuner in the lazarette.

In black is the autopilot linear drive directly connected to the rudder post in the center of the photo. To the right in black is the mechanism that measures the angle of the rudder for the autopilot.