Another hot and busy week onboard the Good Ship Möbius here in the Finike marina as we continue to work on the seemingly endless ToDo list of jobs we need to complete to get Möbius fully ship shape to the degree that we can be confident to go to sea on her. Weather here continues to be wonderful although the daytime temps have been creeping up to the mid 30’s (mid 90’s for those who are metric challenged) but we have the AirCon working very well now and use that to cool down Christine’s office during the daytime, the SuperSalon for dinners and our Master Cabin just before we head off to bed. The “eXcessive” EPDM insulation we installed throughout the boat is really paying great dividends now as it keeps the heat out and the cooled down temps in so the loads on our AirCon chiller system are minimized.
This great weather, which is normal for us in this part of Turkey, also inspired Captain Christine to take to the air as she started to log more hours with our DJI Mavic Air 2 drone. We’ve had it for quite a while but have both been so busy with boat work that we just have not had the time to fly it and become familiar with it. Christine will put together some videos she took with it and post these a bit later for you to enjoy and I can give you this aerial view of Möbius as a teaser.
This is where we are tied up at Finike Marina and will give you a different perspective on what Möbius looks like from above. Easy to see the 14 solar panels from this viewpoint.
Flying a bit further away to give you this view looking back at Möbius to help orient you as to where we are within the marina. You can Click to enlarge this or any other photo.
This pano shot from a bit further out will give you a better sense of our surroundings and where we go for our evening swim after quitting work every day.
Compressor Installed
You may recall that back in June we drove up to a big hardware store north of us to pick up a new air compressor for the Workshop and after testing it out and thinking over the best location, I got around to permanently mounting it this week.
Reminding you that this is a WORK shop, so a bit messy, but you can see the white Kuletas compressor mounted underneath the Aft end of my Port/Left side workbench.
This is one of the newer types of compressors that has two motors each with two compressors so four compressors all together. This enables each one to be smaller and run at lower RPM’s and run eXtremely quietly! I can hear it come on when I’m in the workshop but it doesn’t interrupt a conversation and you can’t hear it at all outside of the workshop.
This air compressor is a super handy bit of kit to have and in addition to using it to power some pneumatic tools, clean tight passages out and blow up inflatable kayaks and the like, we use this to provide air to breathe using our Hookah or Snuba gear to work underneath or dive down to about 20m/65ft up to 100 feet around the boat.
It was definately a shoehorned fit with less than 1cm to clear at the top but this location keeps the compressor out of the way, easy to service and uses an otherwise not so usable wedge shaped space. 
And of course we continue to have some “infant mortality” jobs on the list such as when this seam in our brand new sand filter burst and started spraying seawater all over the Workshop.
While I hunt down a newer and better version I have just bypassed this for now and run the seawater supply to our Delfin 200L/hr watermaker through just our primary and secondary sediment filters for now. These “media” or sand filters are most commonly used for swimming pools so many of you will recognize this. However they are the secret weapon for dramatically reducing the maintenance of a watermaker by filtering out almost everything down to about 5 microns prior to going to the two sediment filters. We would normally need to clean those filters every 10 hours of use and replace them every month or so whereas with the media filter in front, the sediment filters last for over a year.
Belting Up!
What I will do for the rest of this posting is go through the belt drive system I designed and built to power the seawater pump and Electrodyne alternator mounted on the front of Mr. Gee. I’ve been reminded by several of you that I promised to do this many months ago so my thanks for your patience in waiting until now. Hope the wait will have been worth it.
The Problem:
To put this all in context, I had a relatively large seawater pump and two very large alternators that I needed to mount on Mr. Gee our Gardner 6XB and then drive them both from his crankshaft.
The seawater pump weighs about 7kg/15lbs and each of the Electrodyne 250A @ 24V alternators weigh 40kg/88lbs so the mounting system needs to be eXtremely strong and solid. Both the pump and the alternator require a good bit of power to drive them so the drive system needed to be equally as tough and to be up for this task of years of trouble free service.
I won’t go into much detail on this but the seawater pump pulls seawater direct from the sea chest in the Engine Room and then pumps this water through three heat exchangers/coolers, one to cool engine oil, one to cool the engine’s water/antifreeze coolant and one to cool the Nogva gearbox oil before it finally and perhaps most importantly gets sprayed into the exhaust elbow to cool down the exhaust gas and then exit out of the boat.
If this pump fails for any reason, the engine would overheat quickly and cause some extreme damage. Both of these bits of kit are therefore very critical to keeping the boat running, the seawater pump in particular so I needed to come up with a design that would be as bullet proof as possible.
There are two of these big red Electrodyne brutes which have a de-rated output of 250A @ 24V and each one weighs in at 40kg/88lbs and can take up to 20HP to drive at maximum output so their mounting and driving systems have to be equally as eXtreme.
However this essentially gives us the equivalent of a 12kW “generator” whenever Mr. Gee is running so these ensure that we never have any shortage of amps to keep our batteries fully charged and power all our electrical systems whenever we are underway.
Of course we are at anchor much more than we are underway so our 4.4kWp solar array keeps the batteries fully charged the majority of the time.
But how to mount them and drive them was the big question?
Direct PTO Mounting for Electrodyne #1
Mounting one of the #1 Electrodyne alternator was relatively easy as Gardner LXB engines have a dedicated PTO driven system for driving one alternator. I had a short jack shaft in my spare parts that I was able to machine some adaptors for that connect the end of the jack shaft to the PTO output and the input shaft of the Electrodyne.
Then I was able to machine some other adaptors for these ribs where the alternator body bolts directly to the side of the Gardner crankcase.
Using this Black metal band strap to hold it all together. KISS and eXtremely strong, what’s not to like?
As you can see this was quite the shoehorned fit but was relatively straightforward to do compared to coming up with a way of mounting the second Electrodyne.
Mounting Big Red #2
Physically mounting the second alternator was actually not too difficult thanks to the nice large flat mounting pad that the Gardner 6LXB’s have on their front Left corner. This was originally used to mount things such as air compressors on the automotive version of LXB’s used in trucks or to mount water pumps on the marine versions. I had another place in mind for the seawater pump so I used this mounting pad for the second Electrodyne instead.
Pretty straight forward, I machined two 25mm thick AL plates and drilled them to match the spacing of the four threaded holes that were already in the mounting pad.
Then I machined and drilled the riser for the through bolt on the bottom of the Electrodyne and welded this all together.
This created a super solid mounting system for this second Electrodyne. Then I fabricated a SS bar that connects to the red tab you see just in front of my knuckles here, which holds the alternator in its final position and it was now fully mounted.
But how to drive this second Electrodyne AND the sea water pump was the big question!
Mounting the Jabsco 6400 Series Sea Water Pump
Having used the Left side mounting pad on the Gardner for Big Red #2 I now needed to come up with an equally robust mount for the Jabsco seawater pump.
As you can see the pump has a simple flat mounting pad on the bottom with four bolt holes to fasten it down and wanting to KISS (Keep It Simple & Safe) I decided to go with an equally simple flat bar of 25mm thick AL which I could quite easily mount vertically over on the Right side of Mr. Gee.
Didn’t take me long to fabricate this mounting bar, bolt the Jabsco pump to it and create some simple mounts for this bar to bolt onto the front right side of Mr. Gee.
As with the Electrodyne alternators, the mounting part of this puzzle was relatively easy, now on to the bigger challenge of driving both the water pump and the alternator.
Designing the Drive System
I spent a LOT of time sketching out ideas on my favorite medium; old cardboard boxes! I would sketch up very rough ideas of every possible drive system I could imagine and pulled lots of dimensions off of Mr. Gee, the Electrodyne and the Jabsco sea water pump as I refined the design.
As my idea took shape I started searching for the components I would need for the actual drive components such as the pulleys for the belt and what their requirements were for power, RPM, etc..
I knew this was going to be a rubber belt drive system but traditional V-belts were just not up for the job even if I used two or three of them and they tend to slip quite easily if the belt tension is not just right and very tight. They also require very close alignment or else they start to wear and through black rubber dust all over the engine room.
Ask me how I know all this?!!
For a long while I thought I was going to use a multi V serpentine belt drive setup, As per this nice lineup of different V belt types of pulleys, you can see that these multi rib belts and pulleys are able to handle much bigger loads and are more durable. These are used on millions of cars and trucks around the world to drive their alternators, water pumps, etc. so they are well proven.
Better yet, I already had two of these as they came with the Electrodyne alternators I already had on hand. You can see one inside the white rectangle on the left.
However, this still left me with having to custom build a multi V groove pulley to drive all this off of the front end of Mr. Gee’s crankshaft and one to mount on the keyed shaft of the Jabsco water pump. Not a big deal in and of itself, BUT if I was going to have to build custom pulleys, why not go for an even better belt drive system?
Good – Better – Best
Traditional V belt drives are good and serpentine multi groove V belts are better but cogged belts are THE best when it comes to driving high power shafts. My Harley Davidson motorcycles used these instead of chain drives so I was very familiar with them and how well they worked.
Many of you might know of these and refer to them as “timing belts” as they are used in millions of gas and diesel engines in cars, trucks, busses and boats around the world to very accurately drive the camshaft in those engines. In that job they are required to have zero “slip” or else the timing of the valves opening and closing won’t work and they need to be eXtremely long lasting as replacing them can be very expensive due to all the labour required to remove and replace them on most engines.
Once I got onto that line of thinking the choice was simple. Amongst other benefits these cogged belts gave me the following benefits:
- Tried and True having been used for decades in millions if not billions of exiting engines
- Readily available to buy new ones around the world if ever needed. (I of course have two spare on hand already)
- Zero slip = zero belt dust = super accurate tachometer sensing on the alternator
- fast, easy, tool-less belt changing
- automatic tensioning with readily available spring loaded tensioners used in those millions of other engines
- low axial (sideways) loads on the bearings of the alternator and water pump which in my experience is the #1 cause of failure.
- Dead quiet operation; no belt squealing or squeaking
As you can see, this decision was easy, now on to designing a way to make this all work and find the cogged belt drive pulleys I would need to buy or make.
McMaster-Carr to the Rescue!
Where do you go when you have these kinds of needs for mechanical parts?? THE best source I know of, which also happens to have one of THE best designed web sites I’ve ever used; McMaster-Carr.
Within seconds, I got to this page that had eXactly what I needed.
A full range of these beautifully machined cogged belt pulleys. Took me a few more hours playing around with different sizes for the three pulleys I needed to get the RPM just right for the outputs of the water pump and the alternator;
* one large 142mm pitch diameter for the main drive off the Crankshaft,
* one medium size 142mm pitch diameter to drive the Jabsco pump at its sweet spot of output when Mr. Gee is at 1400 RPM cruising speed
* and one smaller 66 Pitch diameter pulley to drive the Electrodyne at its Goldilocks RPM.
In addition to the three pulleys; I also ordered the just right sized cog belts made by Gates. Only one belt is needed but I ordered 3 so I have two for spares in the unlikely event that one belt breaks at some point.
The real Pièce de résistance though came when I happened to notice down at the very bottom of the McMaster-Carr page you see up above, these “quick disconnect bushings”.
Took me a few minutes to realize just how ingenious this design was and the short story is that the smaller diameter of the quick disconnect part in my hand has a slight taper to it which fits into the matching inner hole of the cogged pulleys.
This allows the Quick Connect to slide all the way inside the cogged belt pully and you’ll notice that these Quick Connects are slit on one side opposite the keyway.
Holding the two parts together you tighten down the three bolts which forces the tapered QC to expand and jam itself tightly onto both the keyed shaft and the outer cogged pulley.
Brilliant!
You will be forgiven for not sharing my eXcitement but for me this mounting system to attach the cogged belt pulleys to just about any size of keyed shaft was was like a gift from the mechanical gods. I quickly added three to my order and it was on its way to me.
Putting All the Puzzle Pieces Together
I now had all the pieces for this fun puzzle but still had to design it all up so that it could be installed on Mr. Gee. So I turned to my favorite 3D modeller, Autodesk’s Fusion 360 and was able to convert all my cardboard sketches into 3D models of each of the pieces and then accurately position them.
McMaster-Carr provides 3D model files for everything they sell so I could quickly download the three pulleys and three Quick Connect fittings. Took a bit longer to create the 3D models for the Jabsco pump and the Gardner parts surrounding the crankshaft but with those on my screen I could then try out different positions within the constraints I had from Mr. Gee.
This was additionally challenged by the fact that I had also designed a custom version of the Gardner chain drive hand starter system which is the black line diagram you see overlaid here.
Things were particularly “interesting” and close fitting down around the crankshaft where I needed to fit the red chainwheel for the hand starting chain and then come up with the Blue AL adaptor for it to spin on which in turn would be just the right spacing for the cogged belt pulley mounted on the custom Olive Green adaptor to attach the cogged pulley to the crankshaft.
As you may have figured out by now I don’t throw ANYTHING away and so I had kept the original 4 V belt pulley that came with Mr. Gee, even though it had a large piece of it broken away. But this gave me the center piece that was already machined to just right fit on the keyed end of Mr. Gee’s crankshaft so I cut it out with a plasma gun and used it ….
….. to quickly machine it into this part which is the Olive Green part in the 3D model above.
After making a few more parts, I could now dry assemble everything to see how well my 3D modeling transformed into the real world on the front of Mr. Gee.
Now to test how the belt fit and if all the pulley’s aligned with each other in all three planes so the belt would run true and free with no binding or chafing.
Worked out great!
BUT, there was still one critical part missing.
Can you figure out what that missing part is?
Correct! I need to add in that spring loaded automatic belt tensioner!
To mount this onto the front of Mr. Gee in just the right fore/aft position so that the black idler pulley rides exactly in the center of the rubber cogged belt, I needed to space it out about 38mm so I quickly used by drill press/milling machine to build this solid AL spacer.
Next I made up a template for the 10mm thick AL plate that this would mount onto.
Like this.
Bolted that to the Gardner cast AL support bracket supporting the cast AL cooling water holding tank, held the spring loaded tension wheel out of the way while I slid the cogged belt into lace and released the tensioner.
Et Voila! It all came together and works like a charm.
Final piece of this multipart puzzle was to add in the chain drive hand crank system to make sure all the many players in this very busy front end all played nice together.
You can see just how tight some of these clearances were in all this but it worked out just as I had modelled it, all the belt pulleys and chain wheels aligned with each other so they were all happy and it has been running like a charm for the past few months now.
Whew! Sure glad I was finally able to put this all together for you and for those who were brave enough and preserved to get to the end of this long and winding explanation. Congrats to all of you who did and for the smart ones who just skipped to the end.
I’ll leave you with one parting shot from Christine’s recent photo shot with the drone. It is a bit distorted with such a wide angle but this is looking across the entrance to the marina where Möbius is a bit left of center along that stone breakwater.
Thanks for joining me here again and don’t forget to add your comments and questions in the “Join the Discussion” box below.
-Wayne
Congratulations on getting your A/C sorted out. Very disturbing to see the failure of that huge “pool filter”. I was expecting that would be in use for a decade! I’ll bet you’re annoyed. Thanks for the explanation of the use of the timing belts. It looks very reliable.
Yup, the AC has been a real treat to have during that heat wave here a few weeks ago. We are now using it less and less as the temps decline as summer wanes but it was toasty enough a few days this week to still be a welcome thing to have. Christine finds it particularly great when she is working away in her office and Ruby and Barney are with her with big smiles on their faces we think as well!.
The split in the poly media filter tank surprised me as well Wade but as we both know such “infant mortality” does happen when new product fail so just another one to add to the list. I had wanted to get a FRP tank, these are wrapped fiberglass reinforced tanks but couldn’t find one or get one sent to us here but I’m back to working on that now. In the interim we can still use the watermaker by bypassing the media filter, just go through filters faster until I get a new media filter.
Hope you guys had a great sail and that your travel plans from Alanya are shaping up well in these crazy times. Do come for a visit whenever time allows and depending on how things go with our work on Möbius we may even take a run down to see you there on Möbius.
I can indeed recommend the use of timing or cogged belts for driving the various key items we need on our marine engines. They do represent a bit of an investment in time and money to convert an existing setup from V belts to cogged but if you do end up in a situation where you have existing V belts that are not doing well then I would suggest that going cogged is no more costly or difficult than going with serpentine and so I’d chose cogged every time. If you DIY all of this the parts are readily available from McMaster-Carr and were not very expensive as McMaster-Carr does not have the word “marine” anywhere! 🙂 So it would mostly be down to the amount of time it would take to remove the old pulleys and retrofit the new ones. You also need to figure out a way to mount a spring loaded tensioner but that can usually be done in a way similar to what I did by bolting on a blank plate to some existing engine bolts and then bolting the tensioner to that.
The plusses I outlined in the post for these cogged belts vs V belts are very significant and play out over the long run so I think that when you take the longer range view and consider things like how you can make the bearings and seals in your alternators and pumps last so much longer and how quickly you can replace a belt in an emergency situation, I would argue that there is a net “savings” potential with this conversion. In my case I was starting from scratch and needed a drive system for my seawater pump and big alternator so going with this cogged belt solution became a clear and easy choice.
-Wayne
Wayne – another great blog along your journey. It reminds me of my old business partner, George Murray. He’d grown up through the Apprentice scheme at Ruston and Hornsby in Lancashire UK as they transitioned away from making traction engines and steam locomotives to diesels. He always wore similar suit and tie but come a problem, out came the spanner and calipers and he’d start sketching. There is a lot to be said for a basic engineering appreciation and skills, in part, I regret their passing from our industry. Keep it up! Chris
Thanks Chris. I am eXtremely grateful for all I’ve been able to learn from the diverse jobs and hobbies I’ve had over the years. Being able to continue to use these every day is a huge part of what drives me and makes this otherwise arduous task of designing and building a new boat be more pleasure than pain.
I am also more and more optimistic looking forward as I see more and more people using things like 3D modeling, scanning and 3D printing to create things they need or convert their ideas to reality. I also sense more people finding the value in sketching, be it on paper (cardboard in my case!) or on screens or tablets which I do as well as they plot out their solutions to some problem or idea they are working on. Perhaps most of all I am delighted by the ongoing and I think exponential growth of the general “Maker Movement” so I am seeing more and more people experiencing and sharing the joys of making things themselves and usually designing some or all of these as well. It is now no more difficult to send off your design to a 3D printing service than it used to be to drop off your 35mm film at a photo shop and have the “results” back in a few days. Now those results are a fully finished part rather than a photograph which seems much more powerful than ever.
I was fortunate enough to discover the joys of making things and working with my hands when I was a very young lad and so that has driven me all my life. It has certainly been a big part of what has made this most recent adventure be more pleasure than pain and I remain convinced that all the blood, sweat and tears we’ve invested to design and build Möbius will continue to pay us more and more dividends for all the years we see ourselves eXploring the world aboard her.
Hope to see more of your build as it progresses and best wishes with your journey.
-Wayne
Regarding the 5+ year build time, I just noticed the Arksen 85 is advertised as an 18 month build, and they do all the work, not you, the buyer. What would explain the huge time difference?
Sorry for any confusion I’ve caused regarding the timing involved here David. My references to it having been as much as 5+ years is the big picture view starting from when Christine and I first hatched “Project Goldilocks” and became serious about designing and building of what is now Möbius. This longer time frame included all the phases involved to both come up with the design, work through all the details required to get to a fully complete 3D model, generate cut files and then begin the actual physical building of the boat. This time continues through launching the boat, completing all the “in the water” installations and testing and now into the commissioning and sea trials phases with their inherent additional jobs needing to be done.
The 18 months BUILD TIME that Arksen refers to is a typical “industry standard” which many builders quote. However, when you check the “fine print” this clock starts when the actual physical construction of the hull first begins so all the design, cut files and ordering has already happened and the aluminium (in our case) has already been delivered to the builder. Similarly the build clock usually stops when construction ends and therefore does not include the launching, testing, configuration, commissioning, etc. that is required before the owners could actually leave the dock and sail away.
You might be interested to know that the whole leadership team of Arksen spent the better part of a day with Christine and I aboard Möbius about a year and a half ago and we had a great time doing a deep dive into Möbius and where she was at that time. We spoke at length about their Arksen 85 and other models but their build clocks had not been started by then so all this time is not considered, nor should it be, as part of the Build Time of a boat.
The other key element that would help answer your “What would explain the huge time difference?” question is that 5+ also refers to the delta in $m of the cost of the Arksen 85 and XPM78-01 so there is that too.
Your question is a very good one and one that many have and for us it was worth the wait and doing it the way we have was simply what worked best for us. As I’ve said many times here, my perspective is that what’s “best” is that we all do things in the ways that are “just right, just for us” and this therefore leads to a very naturally large range in all aspects from time to costs to end up with what is the Goldilocks boat for every owner.
Hope this all helps answer your good question and how such large differences in timing can be explained.
-Wayne
Dear Wayne
You mentioned that during the summer heat you are using your air-conditioning chiller occasionally on MOBIUS. I would like to ask:
a) How many Amp-hours does just the air-conditioning use on an average day?
b) Is the average solar output enough to keep the batteries charged when using average air-conditioning and all the other loads or do you occasionally “cheat” using shore power?
c) At anchor (no shore power available): How many Amperes would the 2 alternators deliver when running the GARDNER engine at idle power? Are you willing to share the Amps vs. RPM curve?
What is your estimated date to depart the marina considering your “seemingly endless” to-do list?
Best regards, and thank you for the best blog in this domain.
Hi Markus, short answer is that I’m working on answering all your very good questions in more depth but want to wait a bit more till I have more data to share. And of course what I really need is more time in a day as I’m still pretty much consumed in boat work trying to finish everything here aboard Möbius. But here are some quick responses to our questions:
** NOTE: I don’t find Ah to be all that useful as they obviously depend on voltage and so I will consistently use Watts and Wh for my units.
a) How many Amp-hours does just the air-conditioning use on an average day?
This is a bit difficult to answer as there are so many variables and I don’t have any direct monitoring (yet) of just the loads from the Chiller and Air Handlers. You would also need to do some cumulative totals for energy consumption over the course of a whole day because the AirCon cycles up and down as the demand, ambient and room temps change. But based on what I can watch on the overall monitoring I do for the whole boat, my best estimate would be that we have been using about 12kWh/day for the AirCon. We are not trying to be very conservative right now as we are more interested in gathering numbers and loading systems up to give them more of a ”stress test” to flush out any problems and this applies to our AirCon use as well. Typical daytime temps here have been averaging around 35C/95F and we run the 12kBTU air handler in Christine Office for about 6 hours, the two 18kBTU units in the SuperSalon for about 4-5 hours and the 18kBTU in the Master Cabin for about 3-4 hours.
b) Is the average solar output enough to keep the batteries charged when using average air-conditioning and all the other loads or do you occasionally “cheat” using shore power?
Since we got to Finike marina at the beginning of July, we were away being Gramma and Grampa for about 3 weeks and so only been back living aboard since the end of July, less than a month, so not a lot of data collection time just yet. During that time we have mostly been “cheating” and plugged into a 16A shore power connection because it is included “free” with our annual contract with Setur Marinas. However this is the first time since we launched the boat in February that we’ve had any shore power at all so I have a good idea of our solar panel outputs from February through July and I’d say that averages about 16kWh per day.
When we were in Antalya and had no shore power, but also did not have AirCon working yet, the batteries were back to 100% by about 11am to noon time. Other than AirCon we were doing our best to run as many of our electrical systems as possible including the water heater 230v element that we would normally never use, doing all our cooking every day on a combination of our induction cooktop and “smart oven” that uses convection, grill and microwave, and then the full compliment of computers, tablets, phones, cameras, Alexa/Google devices, 4 fridge/freezers, etc. My best estimate is that we were consuming about 8-10kWh per day and hence the16kWh of daily solar output was able to keep up very easily.
So my expectations are that when we are being more “normal” and conservative with our AirCon use when everything is running on solar power only and we are in these hot temperature times, we would be consuming about 16-18kWh per day which would be at the limit or just above what the solar panels could match. But I’m fairly pleased with these early results as it is about the worst case scenario for AirCon requirements so I would expect these to go down a lot and soon not be used at all once the ambient temps get down below 30 or so. I will also need to see what the solar output numbers are during the winter months with their correspondingly lower daily solar outputs. However our daily electrical demands also go down a lot then and all our heating requirements are met by our Kabola diesel boiler which has almost no electrical consumption.
c) At anchor (no shore power available): How many Amperes would the 2 alternators deliver when running the GARDNER engine at idle power? Are you willing to share the Amps vs. RPM curve?
I will soon be putting up a new article about our Electrodyne/WakeSpeed 500 charging system and I’ll be able to post the Amps/RPM curves then. If we were to be running Mr. Gee as a “generator”, meaning at anchor when we needed the alternator output to supplement our solar, I would most likely run him at about 1000 RPM as Gardner engines are very low revving and he idles below 400. I glossed over it in last weeks article about selecting the right size pulleys for the Electrodyne alternators and the Jabsco seawater pump, but I spent quite a bit of time calculating these in order to get the just right RPM’s for these three units that were all being driven off of Mr. Gee. In the case of the Electrodyne alternators they both run at different RPM’s because one is driven off a geared PTO that has a fixed 1.8:1 ration to crankshaft RPM and so I could only play around with the belt driven Electrodyne. What I settled on was a 2.15:1 ratio for the belt driven Big Red #1 Electrodyne to match up against #2 spinning at 1.8:1 rates. This nets out as follows, when Mr .Gee is spinning at 1000 RPM Big Red #1 Electrodyne is spinning at 2153 RPM putting out 195A and #2 is 1800 RPM putting out about 145A so the combined total output of the two alternators would be about 390A.
All still theoretical as I have not had time to get the WakeSpeed regulators all dialed in but I will be updating you all on the blog as I get these jobs done and have some of the real world data to share. But I have a very accurate graph from the test bench at Electrodyne when they were testing these alternators before shipping and my calculations for output at various RPM’s above is based on that so I think these numbers should be close.
d) What is your estimated date to depart the marina considering your “seemingly endless” to-do list?
Multi part answer. We have an annual contract with Setur marinas where you have a “home marina” which for us is Finike and then you can spend up to a month at any of the other 10 marinas that are spread out along the Turkish Turquoise Coast that stretches all the way up to Istanbul. Right now my hope is that we will have enough of the critical systems on Möbius working by the end of September or so and as soon as that happens we will start venturing out to visit these other marinas and see more of the beautiful coasts of Turkey. This will also enable us to flush out more gremlins and perhaps most importantly let us keep climbing the relatively steep learning curve of all these systems on this very unique power boat. Keep in mind that up to now we have been sailors all our lives so with this not only being a power boat but one with CPP propeller, the Gardner and then all the new age navigation, control and monitoring systems, there is a LOT to learn and get accustomed to.
Once the winter weather arrives which is typically around November or so, we will come back here to Finike and keep Möbius safely docked here for the winter months. We will likely head over to North America for some Gramma Grampa time and to see friends and family who are spread out all across both the US and Canada and then come back to Möbius perhaps around the end of Feb in time to get her all spruced up and ship shape so we are ready to cut the dock lines and head out from Turkey to begin our cruising West across the Med.
Hope that answers your good questions well enough to tide you over till I have more details to provide in upcoming posts.
Oh! And thanks so much for that eXtremely generous compliment about how much you are enjoying this blog and all our postings. Much appreciated and will do our best to continue posting content that you and others find to be of good value!
-Wayne
OK buddy, you’re having far too much fun with the todo list. As we used to say “sailors belong on ships and ships belong at sea” 0:)
Well, I don’t know that it feels like I’m having too much fun just yet John but we’re making progress and rest assured that we have Mother Ocean calling our name more loudly every day.
Our top priority though is to make sure that we have Möbius in the condition we need to go to sea on her and be able to finally cut the dock lines here in Turkey and start wandering our way West out of the Med as we get back to full time cruising and eXploring the world. We will do that the first weather window we can get next year, hopefully March/April or so. However, by next month we hope to have most of the Must Do jobs and ones that we need to be in the marina to do, all finished up so we can start doing some trips up and down the coast of Turkey. This will allow us to both flush out more of the hidden “moles” we need to whack as well as enabling us to get accustomed to this very new and eXtremely different boat for us. We are looking forward to both of those changes so stay tuned as we start spending more time at sea and less at the dock!
“we use this to provide air to breathe using our Hookah or Snuba gear to work underneath or dive down to about 20m/65ft up to 100 feet around the boat”
I would think about this twice and then more. Diving compressor is _very_ different from tools compressor, and for a reason. This is something that can actually cause extremely serious harm or worse.
I would never dive from a non-rated and certified air compressor. I can recommend Bauer Junior II or similar, thats what I have myself.
Sorry for any confusion my brief comment about our use of air compressors for Snuba or Hookah style diving from the boat and our Tender. We don’t carry any actual SCUBA equipment with us as we have found that snorkeling is much more enjoyable for us most of th time. For us all the colour and exciting creatures and underwater discoveries are where the sunlight is the best and that’s usually within the first 25-40 feet. And a lot of our underwater time is spent doing things like cleaning the bottom or doing other work on the bottom of Möbius. Therefore we’ve been using a Snuba or Hookah setup for about two decades now and can’t imagine not having this on any boat we live on. We will actually end up with two as we will have a portable one in the Tender that will be DC based so we can go Snuba “diving” afar from Möbius. We had a Canadian made SeaBreathe dual diver unit on our last boat which served us well for over 10 years so I may buy another one of those but they are also pretty easy to build yourself as all the equipment is very readily available.
I don’t know much about them but I’m sure that the Bauer Dive Compressor is a good unit but not the use case for us. We don’t have the need for filling SCUBA tanks because when we are in areas that SCUBA is needed to go down to greater depths, then we either rent the equipment or hire a dive operator to do that. So all we need is a good supply of clean fresh air that we an send down the 100’ hoses we run from our air compressor onboard or in the Tender and all we need to have is the regulator, mask and fins. The air compressor does of course need to be “oil less” and I always add an additional set of filters to be sure the air is completely clean but this is all pretty simple and works really well.
I get these questions from time to time about these kind of Hookah or Snuba rigs but it is usually the same confusion over the very different conditions and depths involved. I’ve spoken with a LOT of professional divers who clean the bottoms of boats and do other underwater boat work and the majority of them use this same kind of Hookah setup and have done for decades. So they do work very well but only up to reasonably shallow depths and when close enough to the surface based compressor. The benefits of being able to be so unencumbered when diving with not much more than you have to be snorkeling are amazing and these setups also allow us to share the joys of underwater snorkeling with younger children who would not be able to use actual SCUBA equipment. It only takes a few minutes for them to get used to breathing through the regulator before they are under the water with us and able to enjoy being under for longer periods of time to really take in what Mother Nature has to show us down there.
Thanks for the concern though Andy, and for the recommendation for a proper dive bottle compressor if we were to ever start doing more SCUBA diving. For now though, Snuba is what we know and love and we can’t wait to start using our new setup again soon.
-Wayne
Toothed belts are the way to go – just be careful you match the belt/pulley profiles carefully. We went the Tooth belt route for sawmill equipment, and never looked back – more power, less slippage/stretch, almost zero maintenance. The only issue is tooth pitch/designs can be close, but not the same !!
Hey there Pat, thanks for these notes from your experience with cogged or toothed belts in your industry days.
You are quite right about the need to have that Goldilocks just right fit between the belt teeth/cogs and the ones on the pulley and so I spent a good bit of time on the McMaster-Carr web site as well as the Gates and other related sites when I was doing my research on all this. The pulley’s I selected are specifically made and tested for the Gates belt I ordered so I think everything should match up well and last us many years.
As per your experience, mine is that these are THE way to go if you can with their combination of pretty much zero maintenance, zero slip/stretch, no lubrication required, etc. I get an additional bonus in that I can pull very accurate RPM data off of the Electrodyne alternators because I know there is no slipping of the belts to throw off those pulse counts and so I will soon be setting up a digital tachometer gauge that uses the Electrodyne/WakeSpeed 500 setup to give it the correct RPM that Mr. Gee is spinning. I have multiple tachometers using different sources for their rev counting and a handy little hand held digital tach as well for measuring RPM of anything that turns so I think I’ve got rev counting well covered, which I need to.
Thanks for the advise and do keep it coming. As you know I need all I can get!! 😉
– Wayne
-Wayne