The executive summary for today is: Not a lot 🙂
Again I needed to do some work this morning and then we felt we needed to take some rest this afternoon, especially after carrying lots of heavy stuff for the motor frame up the ladder.
So we spent a few hours sitting around the motor compartment plotting and planning how everything is going to line up. We even made some decisions. Next the trick will be to do them in the right order.
First we properly fitted the new motor frame drive shaft and it’s bearings. Then we fitted the belt pulley.
That allows us to position the forward end of the motor frame, there is just space to squeeze a replacement belt on when needed.
That allows us to work out the relationship between the end of the propeller shaft where it goes into the thrust bearing part of the Aquadrive, making sure there is enough propeller shaft in the boat for the PSS Pro Dripless Seal.
As you can see there is a lot of motor frame drive shaft that is unsupported at present. And the aft end of it carries a fair lot of weight (the CVT joint, Coupling converter and Coupling).
So a key set of decisions have been made about how we extend the motor frame to support a pillow bearing on the aft end of the motor frame drive shaft; and how we fit the motor frame onto the motor mounts and them into the boat. That is all done now and I can take the parts home and build it all up in the garage.
The next big decision was about the bulkhead that needs to be built to fit the Aquadrive thrust bearing to and which needs to be strong enough to absorb all the thrust from the propeller. This new bulkhead will form the base of the new bulkhead to the aft cabin. So access to the Dripless seal will be by lifting the floor of the aft cabin and access to the Aquadrive through a removable section of the cabin bulkhead. We will make the lower section of the bulkhead from FR4 (10mm vacuum compressed epoxy resin and fibreglass) with plywood triangular braces on each side of the propeller shaft going forward and aft. It will have a U shaped cut-out for the propeller shaft as otherwise the motor compartment isn’t long enough to ever be able to remove the propeller shaft. We will need to create 7 degree angle packing for the Aquadrive to align it correctly with the propeller shaft.
So it looks like we will have a few weekends with a rather more draughty aft cabin as we will have to remove the bulkhead, door and door post before we can fit the new bulkhead and it will take a while to get that properly aligned.
When that is all done we will have to fit some supports for the motor battery bank, which should be reasonably simple, we just need to get the full drivetrain connected first to check the height clearance.
Then we can fit all the bulkheads to the cockpit locker, aft cabin and corridor. Then we can do the wiring. …
Sustainable Sailing 