Several folks have told us that it would be a good idea to put a splash guard between the galley and the nav station. We have always thought this was a good idea, so we've been trying to come up with a design that prevents spill-over from the galley on to the nav station while not compromising visibility and the openness of the space. We came up with the idea of through-bolting a piece of plexiglas in between the galley and the nav station. We designed the piece, and emailed the design to Multicraft Plastics, a local plastic manufacturer. They emailed right back and said it could be done the same day. In about three hours, they called and said it was done. We picked up the piece and took it to the boat. We thought drilling the holes and mounting the plexiglas was going to take 20 minutes. Four hours later, we were still trying to get the plexiglas on! The problem was the hardware we used to mount the plexiglas prevented the gimbaled stove from gimballing, so we had to mount it inside the nav station. Mounting on the inside of the nav station presented another problem though - it didn't fit! We finally cut the plexiglas cut so that it would fit. After that, it took about 20 minutes to mount.
After polishing the tanks through the Racor filter, it was time to replace the filter element. I thought it would be a shame to replace the element and leave the gunk at the bottom of the plastic viewing bowl, so I took the whole Racor housing apart and cleaned all the different pieces. After putting it all back together, I put the new filter element in, and used the filter pump to fill the filter with fuel. Afterwards, we were a little worried about having air in the fuel lines, so I asked Dave Kane for help bleeding air out of the fuel system. He came over and showed us how to bleed air out of the fuel system and gave us a bunch of tips on engine maintenance and repair. Dave and Kathy sail "Lightspeed" a 42 ft. catamaran and have been a great help to us.
Racor Before & After
I bought this digital barograph a while back. It runs on batteries or 12vdc. The batteries last a long time (3 months), but I thought it would be nice to wire directly to the boat's dc system. Plus, if the batteries are installed, they are on standby in case of dc power loss. Luckily, we had disconnected a CO2 detector wired to dc and replaced with a CO2/smoke detector that runs on batteries (for years), so I used that connection for the barograph. It fired right up and started recording barometric pressure. The display toggles from current reading, to one day display, to five day display and back to current reading. It also has rapid rise and rapid drop alerts. Power Consumption: 5.0 mA backlight off / 160 mA backlight on. While I was wiring the barograph, I noticed the stereo is wired to the starter battery, which is a no-no. Nothing but the engine and the battery monitor should be wired to the starter battery, so I need to rewire the stereo to the house battery.
