This will be a much shorter blog post than usual (lucky you!) as it was just a one day work week at Naval Yachts this week with them being closed from Nov. 3-10.  However, as usual there was still some very exciting new developments and new arrivals this past week that both Christine and I are anxious to share with you.  The theme this week seemed to be about “mounting” new items that have just been delivered such as mounts for pumps & alternators, mounting computers and mounting/installing glass walls and doors in the showers.  Without further drivel from me, please grab a comfy chair and a good beverage and come along for this week’s Show & Tell here in Möbius.World.

SHOWERS:  Works of Art & Engineering

I’ve been showing you for many months the progress in building the Heads and Showers in the Guest and Master Cabins and our extensive use of glass in both.  This week all these glass panels were delivered to Naval Yachts so we can finally show you what the real thing looks like although you will have to wait for another week or two to see them fully installed aboard.
For those that are new here or don’t remember, here is a quick rendering of the Master Cabin from the perspective standing in the Entryway door looking forward towards the Bow.  Note the two glass plate walls that form the corner of the Shower in the background of this render.
Switching locations, here is what it looks like when standing front and center in the Master Cabin looking Aft with the etched glass Shower wall corner in the foreground on the Right.
We are SO grateful to be surrounded by so many talented family and friends who very generously and excitedly want to apply their many talents to features inside of Möbius.  Here is one of the best examples; our dear friend Sherry Cooper in her AbFab apartment in downtown Vancouver B.C. working with us on the graphic designs to be etched into those glass corner wall panels.
I have known Sherry and her husband Rick since we were teaching High School together on the Canadian jet fighter base in Baden Baden Germany in 1980-84 and to say that Sherry is talented is about as big of an understatement as I know how to make.

To find out more about Sherry and see what I meant check out her other works HERE and HERE as well as her Instagram page HERE.
Christine and I worked with Sherry to describe as best we could what we wanted to achiever with these etched patterns which was things such as a marine/nautical theme, a taste of First Nation people’s art from the British Columbia area we know and love and to have all this captured in a somewhat abstract and ethereal way.

This is what Sherry came up with and we think the nailed it!  A perfect example of our favorite Goldilocks; just right, just for us type of result.
The sketches above are relatively small hand sketches and we needed to transmogrify these into much larger sizes and be in a CAD/CNC format for the etching work to be done.  Hakan, one of our former Team Möbius members took on this task and created these two Vector based files in AutoCAD which we then sent to the glass etching company.
The etching company used these vector files to CNC cut these shapes into white peel & stick vinyl which they then attached to the two glass panels and sent us this photo on WhatsApp to make sure this was what we wanted and then they went ahead and did the etching.
Here are the finished panels that were just delivered with all the other glass panels stacked on top and set onto a table below Möbius for now as they await being carried onboard to be installed.
To give you a bit better idea of what these etched panels actually look like, I slid the glass stacked on top off to the side a bit to shoot this for you and give you a bit better sense of the real thing.

Thank you SO much Sherry!  We LOVE what you’ve done and we can’t wait for you and Rick to come join us and take over the Master Cabin so you can shower within your own “walls of art”.
Back in the Guest Cabin we are keeping it a bit simpler with “just” a plain glass door for the Guest Shower that you can see in the stack of glass above and will also soon be installed.

Boat Computer #2

We need plenty of computer muscle to power all the sophisticated navigation software, equipment, monitoring and multiple monitors we have onboard the Good Ship Möbius and so Christine has been busy researching, specifying, ordering and building our two Boat Computers.  She finished our primary PC a few months ago and this week the 2nd Boat Computer arrived from the US.
This is a Kingdel fanless mini PC which Christine finally tracked down on Amazon US and had shipped over to us here in Antalya.

How fast is this new little guy?  Well, Captain Christine, who is normally an Apple Gal I might add, said “It boots up faster than you can say Windows 10”

Our newest family member will live in the overhead space above the main Entryway beside the SkyBridge helm station which is what it will primarily power.

For our fellow Geeks and Geekettes out there, below is a peek inside and the basic specs:

• CPU: Intel 10th Generation i7-10510U, 4 Cores, 8 Threads; Comet Lake; 8MB Cache, Base Frequency: 1.8GHz; Max. Turbo Frequency: 4.9GHz.
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM,
• 512GB M.2 2280 SSD;
• Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet LAN;
• Dual Band 2.4/5GHz Wireless Network Card.
• Integrated Intel UHD Graphics, 4K: HD, 4096×2304@24Hz; DP, 4096×2304@60Hz;
• Gigabit LAN Port, HD Port, DP, 4 USB 3.0.
• Fanless, Smart Design, Full Metal Case, Silent Working, High Speed CPU & SSD, 2 Years Warranty.
• Pre loaded with Window 10 Pro, complete with full license key for reinstalling.

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• This is Christine’s temporary techno test bench in our apartment where she has both Boat Computers hooked up to load up all the software and start configuring them all.

Boat Computer #1 is seen here underneath the table as it has a larger “desktop” size which provides much more space for multiple fans to keep things cool, more expansion board spaces and other advantages we wanted.  It is “only’ an i7 9th generation processor but can run all six of our big monitors and will be our main “go to” computer when we are onboard.
I thought this shot might give you a better perspective on the size differences although the Mini PC I am holding in the foreground appears larger than it really is due to being so much closer to you in this shot.

For those wondering, the black box on top is our Synology NAS or Network Access Storage.  You can slide different hard drives and SSD’s into this box and right now we “only” have two 4TB hard drives in there but easily expandable and we just took note of two Western Digital drives that are 16TB each for just $200 so we will see if we need more storage and add as we do.

We use all this storage volume on our NAS to hold everything from our huge vaults of music and movies for our onboard entertainment and on them more serious side this also holds multiple sets of electronic charts for the whole world, satellite images, all our manuals for all our onboard equipment, all our software both personal productivity software such as MS Office and all our navigation software such as TimeZero, Coastal Explorer,

Why not just keep all this in the cloud?  We do this too, but this NAS gives us direct access to everything without any internet connections at all.  So this creates what you can think of as own personal “onboard cloud”.

Mounting Jabsco Sea Water Pump

For the Gardner engine cooling, I had wanted to install a keel cooler which is made by cutting lengths of aluminium pipe in half lengthwise and welding these to the outside of the hull with U-turns on the ends to create a continuous loop.  The two In/Out ends are then welded through the hull and the engine coolant (anti-freeze + water mix) is circulated through this loop and transfers its heat out into the passing sea water.  Super efficient, no extra pumps or moving parts required and I had this on our previous boat that worked great.
However, for a variety of reasons Naval switched to a heat exchanger style which works like this.  Sea water is drawn in through the Sea Chest and strainers by an engine driven sea water pump which then circulates the cool sea water through a variety of heat exchangers for the engine coolant, engine oil, transmission/CPP oil and finally goes to the wet exhaust to cool it and then the sea water goes out through the exiting sea chest back into the ocean.  These heat exchanger style works fine and is on thousands of boats, just more complex and more moving parts as you can see.
After some research we chose to go with a Bowman heat exchanger which are one of the world’s largest heat exchanger manufacturers based in the UK and they are beautifully made bits of kit to be sure.
Here is a generic illustration showing how a heat exchanger works and it could not be more basic; cold sea water enters the large cylinder (Shell Inlet) and flows around all the smaller tubes inside picking up their heat and then exits out the other end (Shell Outlet).  The liquid to be cooled enters the Tube Inlet and runs through all the small diameter rods or tubes that are surrounded y the colder sea water and then exits out the Tube Outlet having given up most of its heat.
That inner “Tube Stack” as it is called is made out of Titanium in ours and you can see that it is simply a bunch of small diameter tubes which are bundled together and have liquid going into one end of each tube and then out the other.
I didn’t want to take our Bowman’s apart but here is a similar model that will let you see how the Tube Stack fits inside the larger diameter heat exchanger body where the sea water flows.
Sorry, not the greatest quality but best I could find in a pinch here late tonight but this should show you the basic layout and how the various liquids flow through a heat exchanger system.

As you can see this is all simple enough but it does require the addition of a sea water pump to pull in the sea water through the Intake Sea Chest in the Engine Room and then pump it out through all the various heat exchangers and then finally provide the sea water that is injected into the wet exhaust elbow to cool the exhaust gasses.

I chose this Jabsco 1 1/4” bronze pedestal base sea water pump as I have had these in previous boats and know them and their maintenance quite well.  I like to “go with what I know” you know!
 The next bit of “complexity” is that we now need to mount this Jabsco sea water pump and figure out a way to have Mr. Gee drive it.  Cihan has his hands more than full so I have taken on building this mounting system for the Jabsco pump.
The Gardner 6LXB often had sea water pumps mounted on them so there is this very solid flat “pad” up at the very front Stbd/Right side of the massive cast aluminium crankcase with three good size mounting studs so that’s where I’ve designed a mounting system to be.
Here is the top mounting bracket I came up with all ready to bolt onto that “pad” in the photo above.  Not quite up to Gardner standards perhaps but I assure you it will last as long as Mr. Gee will, aka forever!
Difficult to photograph for you but this is what the test fit assembled mount looks like.  The thick AL plate at the top is what is bolted to that pad you saw above which then has the tall thick vertical AL mounting bar bolted to it at the top and an L-bar bracket for the bottom support where I used three bolts on the Sump (oil pan) to hold the bottom of the mounting bar.

The Jabsco sea water pump will bolt about half way along the length of the mounting bar and will be driven by a timing belt type of rubber belt off the Gardner’s crankshaft which you can see off to the mid right side of this photo.

Here is a different view from up above.

The big cast bronze housing is the engine oil heat exchanger which just clears the AL top plate of the upper mounting plate.

The large round cast AL item on the bottom Left with the copper tube snaking upward here is Mr. Gee’s coolant water pump that is internally driven off the camshaft.
For the curious and observant of you, the large diameter black disc resting on the crankshaft is the chainwheel for Mr. Gee’s hand start cranking system which I will show you more of later.
OK, that’s it for this week folks.  Sorry it is so short and that we get a much longer work week this week and have more to show you in the next Möbius.World Progress Update Show & Tell.  Christine and I have had a VERY busy weekend and all day today (Monday) helping out two other couples who may become future new XPM owners.  One couple via a lengthy video call (thanks Andrew & Lili) and the other couple who are long time circumnavigating sailors who are here in Turkey for the winter and drove over to spend the weekend with us here in Antalya to meet the people at Naval Yachts and get a full tour of the Free Zone and Möbius.  We had a great time with Wade & Diane who have such a similar history as Christine and myself and we have just said goodbye for now as they head back to their boat which is about a 3 hour drive West along the coast to Alanya.  Great to meet up with you Wade & Diane and look forward to more such visits.

And thanks to all of YOU who chose to join us here on the Möbius.World blog every week.  We really appreciate having you along for the ride and for all your questions and comments that you write in the “Join the Discussion” box below.  Please keep them coming, we prize them highly.

-Wayne