Helpful tips

Vero Beach
No LL




















Several readers sent in helpful tips about my zinc problem. Thank you very much. I think I'll try some of the tips to limp along instead of precipitously running to haul the boat out of the water.

The picture above was taken after our repowering project. We have a Max-Prop that feathers when in neutral. You see it here in the feathered posittion. You can also see the cone-shaped zinc attachted to the butt end of the prop. You can also see that there is no room for a collar zinc on the shaft.

We put the new motor in with the help of Bud Taplin. Bud is the guru about all things Westsail. Bud said that in the past he had trouble with Max Props getting too close to the rudder (seen on the far left of this picture). Therefore, he makes the shafts short. The trouble is that he made it so short that we have no room on the shaft for a zinc. In reality, the shaft could have been 3 inches longer while still giving adequade prop-to-rudder clearance.

I thought about moving the whole engine and shaft further aft. I could use more room at the front changing the raw water impeller. But we can't do that without building a new fiberglass platform for the aft motor mount. It would be a major project.

I would also like to re-grease the Max Prop. It has two places where you can remove a little set screw and screw in a grease fitting instead. Then, using a grease gun you pump in grease until it oozes out from all the seams, like in the picture. In theory I could do that under water also, but chances of losing the little set screws and/or the grease nipple would be very high. Perhaps in the Bahamas with clear water, I could get Libby in the water too to hold a big pan under me to catch dropped parts.

By the way, Bill K also commented that low water in the batteries is a sign of overcharging. Maybe so. Another dissapointment on the new motor was that it came with an alternator that uses an internal voltage regulator that is incompatible with the modern external three-stage battery charge controllers. We have such a controller already, but now we can't use it.

Especially when we motor down the ICW, I see the battery voltage pegged at 14 volts all day long, and I wondered if we weren't overcharging. To get around that problem, we would have to buy a new alternator.

Our shore-power battery-charger also does not have a three-stage controller. It is a 25 amp controller and it was plenty expensive. I paid $450 for it. A 40 amp charger with 3-stage controls would have cost more than $750. Ouch.

However, another project on my list this month is to install a battery monitor that I bought on E-Bay last year. The battery monitor lets me keep track of Kw-hours, not just battery voltage. With the monitor I can hopefuly learn a lot more about our energy consumption and our recharging cycles. It should make it clearer whether or not we are overcharging.