Any particular reason you want a bed of coals? I guess for holding a spot fire when at the dock. My working fire is more like 6-8" deep. I do a lot of short trips hauling passengers. Too much residual fire is an issue when I come back to the dock to unload and load. For long runs I love hardwoods, P...

Bart, it's the boat that's anachronistic, not the locktite. And you are talking to a guy with a piston valve engine with ball bearing mains. I have to wear a bag over my head at gatherings. Today has been victories and defeats. A: I somehow misplaced the external jaws for my three jaw chuck when I d...

I find set screws a little problematical but haven't come up with an easy alternative. I'm in the midst of transferring all of my mechanicals into a new hull and made some small changes. I deepened the 'dents' in the prop shaft quite a bit. And then ground the end of the set screw from the usual cup...

I view a bilge pump as a stop gap measure to gain time to fix the leak. Thus vigorous action is valued over other parameters. Glancing at the electric bilge pump on my 25 foot I.C. boat, I see that it is rated at 42 gpm at moderate head. It is perhaps the size of a coconut and uses a 1.5" output hos...

There has been at least one test of every electric and manual bilge pump available. The consensus was that all were wildly out performed by a frightened man with a five gallon bucket with water up to his knees. A decent fire extinguisher as well. That said, they did not include a steam ejector. I do...

Barbara says my crop failure aloft is simply due to gravity. It's sinking in up there and coming out my nose and ears. Science in action.

Booo.

Of course that explains why my head is much shinier than yours. Ladies rubbing on it!

Rub it in, Steve. Rub it in.

Mike

As per our conversation of a few days ago, the Raymarine ST1000 is the unit I am most familiar with. Mine was an earlier model but the differences are cosmetic except for the added LCD screen. I bought mine new in 1991 and it was still on the boat and running fine when I sold the boat recently. Mind...

I have a foot or so of flexible steam pipe between my boiler and engine. Not that it needs to flex seriously but to fix a cracking issue I had with ordinary copper pipe. In spite of some seriously solid motor beds in my new hull, the engine does move a bit when working hard. The question being, are ...