Recent content by Guy Stevens

Head pressure is dependent on temperature.... AND It sounds like you have a leak. Most likely place is the evaporator. Most of these are aluminum roll bond evaporators, and are very easy for the user to damage, making them leak. They also are subject to corrosion, and what just looks like a...

Get a length of light (small diameter) dyneema longer than you need by a few feet, splice a loop into one end. Send someone aloft with the spliced end, and cow hitch it over the pin at the top, or a shackle if you have one instead of a pin. Bring them down, buy them a beer or three, and at your...

That isn't a stress fracture start for that failure it is standard crevice corrosion of Stainless Steel. You can look at this under a microscope and see it. (There are plenty of cheap over your phone microscopes that we use all the time for this purpose.) This chainplate is canary in your coal...

Windvanes are great for long passages. Have had them on all our big boats. Although they are out of favor at the moment as they are not electronic in nature. Most now cruising like to use only the autopilot and charge the batteries a lot more. This is helped it the batteries are Lithium. We have...

We kept the layout. I have seen few people be able to better what was designed by Bruce, and a lot make a dogs breakfast out of what they messed with. The little ice box is medium term storage for us. We tore out and replaced the 1970s foam in the refigerator, unfortunately this cost us the...

This was a wrong construction problem. The eye splices don't work well in this application. There are specific swage terminators made for chain connection which connect directly to the chain instead of using a shackle. Redo with the correct terminators and this problem should go away.

Little late to this party, However I have sailed with most of the wind vanes mentioned here, and a few that are not. ( Cape Horn, Monitor, Aries, Sayes Rig, Autohelm, sailomat, Hydrovane, come to mind). By far and away my favorite is the Cape Horn made in CANADA, not France. We have installed...

That traveler car should have replacement bearings available for it, and if the track is not visibly damaged, I would just get new bearings, and clean everything really well. If the track is not damaged you could get a new car and new sheaves for both the car and the traveler end blocks. The car...

They were welded in the boat or next to the boat before everything went together. They are longer than could be cut out of whatever aluminum sheets there were getting at the time. I'd be more interested in seeing the top, where there could be corrosion from the dissimular metal that the rigging...

I have digital drawings from Bruce King for a lot of the e-39 production, and have Bruce's permision to distribute them. (I thought I put most of them here in the file section. ).

The Cap Shroud and aft lower chainplates are partial ring frames (or large Knees depending on your perspective), which penetrate the deck. I would remove the outer covers, then remove as much fiberglass around them using a dremel tool, (Do not nick the aluminum ring frames. ((A good way to...

Looks like the Rod is over tightened. Causing the deck to be collapsed under the mounting plates. Needs to be removed and evaluated. Possible solution may need to include repairing the top skin if the cracks are more than gell coat deep. If there is core in this area ( I believe there is) it...

Happy to answer any queations. Guy

This can be fixed with cold forming using a mandrel and a larger pin, along with a hammer and a vice. It is not unusual in these older rigs, and is coming back into fashion (Read necessity) with some of the newer stupid multi hull tang designs. How to do this easily: Place a rod of the...

It is a custom Harken part, specifically made for them for that furler. It is the price that screws into the bottom of the drum system. It is a marine eye toggle that is odd shaped with flat sides to allow the locking ring that engages the pins on the bottom of the drum. That ring keeps the...