And 2021 is off to rapid start as the first week of the year has already whipped by me in a flash. Very busy times here as we all push to finish XPM78-01 Möbius and get her in the water by the new target Launch Date of February 12th! Which BTW, is now only 33 calendar days and 25 working days from now. Yikes!!
However, as we all learn over time, deadlines are good things to help us keep our eyes on the prize and get things done so as to ensure that there is no “Slip-Sliding Away” of our Launch Date! Therefore, I am going to stick with using this fixed Launch Date to help keep the positive pressure on all of us on Team Möbius to “get ‘er done” and as my 4 year old granddaughter Blair says (with gusto!) “Let’s DO this!”
I’ll take that advise to heart with my introduction to this Weekly Progress Update and jump right into this week’s Show & Tell of what all happened aboard the Good Ship Möbius this past week of Jan 4-8, 2021
Non-Stick on the Bottom:
Continuing the very rewarding trend of late of hitting lots of different milestones of this build, work began this week on preparing the bottom of the hull for its foul release bottom paint. First step was to clear out all the equipment and materials which had been accumulating underneath the hull on the shop floor.
It helps to have a forklift of course so it didn’t take too long to move everything elsewhere at Naval Yachts and have a clear floor space under Möbius to work on.
Next up was to get rid of the short little hull support posts and replace them with these longer steel tubes that connect just under the Rub Rails and slope down to the floor where they are secured into the concrete with long lag bolts.
You’ll note too that the upper part of the hull sides have now been covered in plastic to keep their freshly sanded surfaces clean.
The two newest members of Team Möbius, Ali kneeling on the Right and Mehmet standing on the Left, get to work grinding down the welds below the waterline and removing the layer of Aluminium Oxide Al2O3that has formed since these hull plates were first welded in place over two years ago. The automatic and rapid formation of Al2O3 is one of the big benefits of building hulls from Aluminium as it is a very had and durable protective layer that prevents any further oxidization or corrosion. However Al2O3 is equally good at “protecting” the hull from paint, which is part of the reason why we are leaving all the exposed aluminium on Möbius unpainted. The one exception is below the waterline where we need to prevent marine growth from forming as this creates a lot of drag on the hull as it slides through the water.
So you need to remove all the Al2O3 before the first coat of epoxy primer goes on. This is the first round of removing the Al2O3 and then just before the first coat of primer is sprayed on, they will give it a light sanding with orbital sanders and a wipe down with Acetone to make sure the AL surfaces are completely clean and oxide free so the primer will bond well
The only item below the waterline that does not get painted is the big 1m OD beautiful Bronze Nogva CPP propeller, though later on, it too will get some special treatment to prevent fouling as even the slightest bit of grown or roughness on a propeller blade causes severe reduction in transferring power from the prop to the water.
The special tube we cut through the Rudder can now be be filled in so Uğur tacked this elliptical AL plate to block off the hole for now. Whenever we might need to pull out the prop shaft, this hole allows me to do so without having to remove the Rudder which can add a lot of time to the prop shaft Re & Re. This will get covered with some epoxy filler and sanded flush with the surface of the Rudder plates as a super slippery Rudder also helps a lot to increase the efficiency of the Rudder and Steering overall.
Another important part of the preparation for the bottom paint is taking off the upper edge of the “Boot Stripe” at the very top to make the transition from the bottom paint to the unpainted aluminium above. This is made SO much easier now that we have laser levels to use rather than the laborious process of measuring every few feet as I’ve had to do in the past to establish what you hope is a level straight line. In keeping with the “lean & mean” exterior esthetic, the Boot Stripe and the bottom paint will both be Black but the Boot Stripe will be glossy Black Polyurethane whereas the Bottom Paint will be the matt finish of the silicone based International InterSleek 1100SR
For those not so familiar with bottom paints, most boats use an Anti-Fouling type of paint which prevents micro organisms from growing on it by having various biocide chemicals such as copper, tin and now more modern toxins which try to prevent growth from forming. This has been done for centuries with many old wooden boats having their bottoms sheathed with sheets of thin copper.
Looking nice and straight to me!
Anti-Foul type bottom paint doesn’t last too long, 6 months to 2 years max, before it either wears off or looses all its anti fouling chemicals and you have to haul out, remove all the old and paint on new coats which is neither quick nor inexpensive, to say nothing of the environmental concerns.
Instead of “Anti” foul we are going to use international InterSleek 1100SR which is a Foul RELEASE type of solution which in the simplest terms is a coating of silicone fluoropolymer which is akin to the non-stick coating such as Teflon on frying pans. When I was a young boy I was struck by the idea of “Better Living Through Chemistry” and my daughter Lia is an Organic Chemist so this more modern and much more effective different kind of chemistry that creates Foul Release paint was a no-brainer for me.
A little kick up at the stern end of the bottom paint to add a bit of flair!
When moving, nothing sticks to the hull but when we sit at anchor for weeks or months at a time, grown will still form on our InterSleek bottom BUT it all comes off with a simple wipe with a cloth or sponge so the amount of time and effort it will take us to “dive the bottom” and clean the hull will be drastically reduced from our previous boats even though Möbius has a much larger bottom surface.![PXL_20210105_121710267[3]](https://mobius.world/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PXL_20210105_1217102673.jpg "PXL_20210105_121710267[3]")
Uğur looked after one more bit of preparation for the bottom painting by sculpting the Exhaust Exit pipe which is not far above the waterline and below the top of the Black Boot Stripe so it too will be painted.
I will talk more about the Foul Release and InterSleek1100 paint as we start applying it in the coming weeks, so to finish up for now let me just add that Foul Release type bottom paints and InterSleek are not well known by most boat owners but it has been the norm for large commercial and military ships since the 90’s. Based on their experience the InterSleek1100 should last for around 5 to 7+ years, so we are eXtremely anxious to see how it performs for us on Möbius. Stay tuned for the next couple of years to find out! 
Non-Slip up on Top:
Just as important as keeping our bottom Non-Stick to prevent growth, we need to keep all our decks and floors up on top to be very Non-Skid to prevent us from slipping when walking around, often in bare wet feet and a energetically moving boat.
For all our decks and other exterior AL surfaces we are using what we think is the ultimate Non-Slip material called TreadMaster which has the tag line “The Original Anti Slip Deck Covering” which has lasted for more than 20 years for many of our friends.
In previous weekly updates you’ve seen the Team covering all the Main Decks and stairs with Treadmaster and this week the finished off the last remaining items such as these AL stairs from the Aft Deck down into the Workshop.
We will leave all the “Slip Sliding Away” to Simon & Garfunkel while we stay put safe with our feel solidly in place on our TreadMaster and that composite grid flooring down in the Workshop and ER thanks very much!
We left what could be the most dangerous or at least slip-prone deck for last; these narrow slopped Side Decks that flank the SkyBridge. Orkan was able to use all the left over TreadMaster from doing the Main Decks to cut out all these smaller “tiles” of TreadMaster to cover these Side Decks and here he has them all cut out and flipped over upside down ready for the AL Side Decks to be sanded and cleaned.
Faruk and Ali could now get busy mixing up the West Systems epoxy adhesive and gluing each piece of TreadMaster into its final positions on the Side Deck surfaces and squeezing out the epoxy to every edge with the HD roller you see here in the foreground.
And in the words of Jean-Louis, Voilà c’est fini!!
TreadMaster is now all done and one more milestone achieved. Well done Team Möbius!!
Much ADO about Non-Slip Inside Too!
Last week you may recall seeing Ramazan finish installing the ADO vinyl LVT flooring in the Master Cabin and he has that now all finished.
Keeping ourselves safe at sea requires that ALL our floors are very Non-Slippery and as you can perhaps make out in this photo, we chose these Ado LVT vinyl floor planks in large part due to the highly textured nature they have that is similar to old well worn woodgrain on patio or pool decks.
His final job to finish the Master Cabin was the two stairs leading up to the Port/Left side of the bed and the removable access lid beside the Shower. These are the only vinyl flooring that is glued down, the rest is all “floating” so it can expand and contract in different temperatures. Here is is using some very heavy weights to keep these pieces flat and squished onto the underlying marine plywood while the adhesive dries overnight.
Master Cabin flooring all finished, Ramazan moved onward and upward to the SuperSalon and moved everything off the floors in there and gave all the plywood base a thorough vacuuming and cleanup.
First task for the SuperSalon floor was to install the wood framing and rigid insulation on the large hinged hatch that provides access down into the cavernous Basement that lies below the AL floor of the whole SuperSalon.
After checking that each plywood floor panel was solidly screwed down, Ramazan stared to do his layout for the floor planks.
Starting with this reference line for laying down each row of planks perfectly parallel to the centerline of the boat.
Click – Click, assemble one row of planks.
Click – Click, lock that row into the previous one laid down.
Rinse and Repeat, with lots of careful scribing and fitting around all the radiused Rosewood toe kicks surrounding all the cabinetry.
Screens, Screens and more Screens!
Winding back the clock by a few days, another eXtremely big milestone for Christine and I happened this week and this photo should give plenty of clues as to what this was.
Can you guess what we are up to here?
Hint.
It has something to do with these two unfilled spaces front and center at the Main Helm.
That’s right! Time to unbox and install all our beautiful big, sunlight readable, touch screen LiteMax helm monitors; two 19” here in the Main Helm and then two more 24” up on the SkyBridge Helm and then on each side of the Main Helm will be another 43” monitor on the Right and a 50” TV/Monitor on the Left.
After a LOT of research and some help from a fellow passage maker, Peter Hayden over on “Adventures of Tanglewood” we finally tracked down the OEM manufacturer of most marine MFD’s and monitors and bought all five Helm monitors from LiteMax in New Taipei City, Taiwan. 
The two 19” Main Helm monitors are LiteMax NavPixel Marine model NPD1968 and this link will give you all the technical details for those wishing to know more. The specs that mattered most to us are that these are fully sunlight readable with 1600 nits (a good phone screen is about 300 nits), AOT touch, high shock & vibration resistance, IP65 waterproof and can be powered from 9-36V DC.
Both monitors slide into this hinged plate above the Main Helm dashboard and allow us to tilt these monitors however we wish to have the best line of sight and least reflection. Captain Christine is peeling off the protective plastic layer to check out the non-reflective screens below.
Another feature we value highly is that these monitors have physical and easy to reach control knobs and buttons. Always frustrating to try to figure out how to increase the brightness as daylight arrives and you’ve had the screens turned down close to black for night time viewing.
Didn’t take us long to get the two 19” monitors mounted into the Main Helm and so we moved up to the SkyBridge where these two openings on the Upper Helm Station were begging to be filled.
First we removed the rear AL panel to give us access to the inside so we could tighten down the very well done mounting screw setup on these monitors.
We also put in a layer of thin EPDM foam rubber to fully seal each monitor into the AL Helm Station.
They fit into their openings like a glove and as you can see the big opening we had designed into this AL Helm Station provided easy access all around each monitor to secure them tightly against each frame.
These 24” monitors are LiteMax NavPixel model NPD2425 with similar specs as the one’s down below. Plenty of connection port choices on the back including the power terminals on the far Left which will be connected to our 24V DC system and then via DVI-D to our onboard boat computers.
As you might see reflected in the plastic protective covers, I took this shot with my camera at eye height when you are sitting in the SkyBridge Helm Chair so this will give you a good sense of the perspective you’ll have when conning the boat from up here with great visibility of the entire Bow and Anchor Deck up front.
When I wasn’t looking Captain Christine snapped this shot of me finishing up the installation under her watchful eye.
We are eXtremely excited to get these bad boys all powered up and connected to our boat computers but that will have to wait until next week so stay tuned for that.
POWER!
Speaking of powering things up, whenever Mr. Gee is running we have up to 24kW of power from the two Electrodyne 250A @28V alternators he is spinning down in the Engine Room. Here is a peek at the cabling that Hilmi completed this week which takes the AC output from the stator windings directly to the externally mounted Electrodyne Rectifiers over on the far Right side of the Workshop.
Each of these Electrodyne beautiful brutes has two individual alternators inside and so there are six cables coming out of each alternator to carry the 3 phase AC current. So Hilmi put his hydraulic lug press to good use crimping all 12 lugs onto each cable.
That shot up above is of Big Red #2 which is driven by the PTO off the bottom Left of Mr. Gee which you can see a wee bit of in the very bottom Right of this photo.
On the Upper Left here, this is Big Red #1 which is mounted up above on this 40mm/ 1 5/8” AL plate I fabricated and bolted onto the pad on Mr. Gee’s cast aluminium crankcase just for this purpose. This will be driven by a cogged “timing belt” setup which I am busy fabricating right now and I will show you more of next week.
Here though you can see the other six cables coming out of the Junction Box atop Big Red #1 on their way over and out of the ER to connect to the Rectifiers that are staying nice and cool out in the Workshop.
Mr. Gee Gets Cagey
Those with eXtremely sharp eyes and memory might notice a new addition to Mr. Gee this week?
Keeping with our KISS or Keep It Simple Safe & Smart approach, I designed a dual purpose AL pipe “cage” to wrap around Mr. Gee to provide solid hand holds whenever you are near him while he’s running. This then also creates the perfect base for the four support rods that go from the pipes of this cage up to the exhaust dry stack system up above which I will show you more of next week.
I pulled off the 2D drawings from my Fusion 360 3D mode above, sent them over to Uğur on WhatsApp and he and Nihat got busy transforming these 2D drawings into 40mm AL pipe reality down on the shop floor.
Same technique you’ve seen us use before, Uğur and Nihat create these large radius bends by cutting a series of slots on the inside of the curve in the 40mm thick wall AL pipe, bends them and then tacks them in place.
We then test fit them in place on Mr. Gee and once tweaked into just the right fit Uğur welds the slots closed.
As you might notice on the model rendering above, each “staple” shaped rail will be bolted to AL plates that span the motor mounts we fabricated here at Naval.
Uğur could now weld on the 20mm / 3/4” thick base plates and weld all the bend slots closed.
Nihat picks up with his angle grinder and quickly cleans up all the welds to create smooth soft curves.
That gives Uğur time to go back into the ER and drill and tap all the threaded holes in the Engine Mount plates so the finished staples can be bolted in place.
Uğur and Nihat were only available Monday and Tuesday this week so this is where they left off and will pick up again tomorrow (Monday) morning to bolt in the longitudinal pipes and start fabricating the support rods that attach to the four AL tabs you can see they have now welded to the tops of each stable rails and will connect to the SS dry stack exhaust pipes you can see here.
We’ve Been Hosed!
Our eXtremely productive plumber Cihan was also with us for Monday and Tuesday and he made great progress plumbing in a lot of hoses and other items so let’s check that out.
This is outside the Aft Stbd/Right corner of the Engine Room Enclosure with the plate removed that covers the far end where the prop shaft enters the ER and connects to the Nogva CPP Servo Reduction Gearbox via the Blue (purple looking here) dripless Tides Marine shaft seal. 
Up above and off to the far Right side of the prop shaft, you can just see the silver coloured AL heat exchanger with the bronze elbow which is what Cihan is now plumbing with this white hose.
This is the heat exchanger that cools down the fresh water/antifreeze mix that circulates through the inside of Mr. Gee and that is what this white hose carries to/from Mr. Gee and the heat exchanger.
If you look at the black composite end plate on this heat exchanger you can see that Cihan has already connected the hose that carries the cool sea water from the Sea Chest in the ER.
Inside the ER on the Right side of Mr. Gee you can now see where two of the white sea hoses connect to Mr. Gee. The top hose in this photo will carry fresh water coolant from the integrated water pump on Mr. Gee and the bottom hose carries sea water out of the long Bronze Engine Oil Heat Exchanger back to the Coolant Heat exchanger we saw in the photos above.
My apologies for not having time to draw up some better illustrations to explain how these heat exchangers all interconnect but for now this photo will show you two of the pumps in this system. The round aluminium pump in the center of the photo above is the integral Garner centrifugal water pump which pumps fresh water/antifreeze coolant back from that silver AL heat exchanger we saw earlier.
The Bronze Jabsco pump on the Right is one that I am in the process of mounting and it is the impeller pump that pulls sea water from the ER Supply Sea Chest into the “IN” labelled port and then out of this pump into that bronze elbow with the Blue painters tape up above. This sea water then runs the length of that Bronze Engine Oil Heat Exchanger bolted to the side of Mr. Gee and exits via the white hose you can see two photos up from here and goes down to that silver AL heat exchanger we saw at the beginning.
The longer white hose in this photo carries Mr. Gee’s fresh coolant back to that silver AL Heat Exchanger.
Clear as mud to most of you and a pathetic job by this former mechanics teacher but best I can do for now folks.
The other new addition this past week was Cihan’s installation of this Blue Beauty which is the big “sand” filter which removes most of the sea critters and debris from the salt water supply for the Delfin 200L/min watermaker.
This is not found in most boats and are normally used in large swimming pool installations, but I long ago discovered that these are the “secret” to extending the life of the other two sea water filters on the watermaker last for months rather than weeks. This filter is filled with a special kind of sand known as Zeolite and it is the first line of defense to filter out the sea water being pumped out of the Sea Chest into the watermaker.
There is a six way valve on top which you use to change between running the seat water through the filter and back flushing it in reverse once in a while to fully clean out all the debris that has been collected by the Zeolite sand. Simple, easy and eXtremely effective.
Super simple in design and to use and plumb with just three ports: Top Right SS hose barb is where sea water is pumped into the filter by the low pressure high volume 24V pump connected to the Sea Chest. Bottom Right is where the cleaned sea water exits and is pumped over to the two standard filters behind the watermaker. Far Left with the SS elbow is where the dirty back flushed water exits and goes out the exiting sea chest in the ER.
In the background on the wall behind the white watermaker housing on the bottom Right, you can see the three other WM filters; the pair on the Left are the Primary/Secondary sea water filters and the one off to the Right is a carbon filter to remove any harmful chemicals in the fresh water you use for back flushing the WM at the end of a run.
As usual of late I’ve got more photos to show you than I have time and dinner is once again waiting with my eXtremely patient and beautiful Bride on this Sunday evening so I’m going to call this a wrap for now and do my best to cover more next week.
Thanks for joining me on this first posting of 2021 and I hope it helps in some small way to get your new year off to a good start. How about if YOU start your New Year off by adding your comments and questions in the “Join the Discussion” box below? They are all true gifts to me and much appreciated!
See you next week.
-Wayne
Interesting as always! Sure makes house building look like child’s play!! 🙂
Not sure about that Elton but lets say this child has a LOT more things to “play” with!
-Wayne
Your blue filter caused me to learn the differences between Zeolite and diatomaceous earth. Cool.
Hi Richard and Happy New Year to you!
All thanks for the Zeolite awareness on my part go to our fellow long range passage maker Peter Hayden who did an extensive amount of research for his watermaker setup on his previous Nordhavn 60 and is doing similar on the new N68 that is currently being completed right now. Peter posted an extensive and typically well written post about this on his “Adventures of Tanglewood” blog HERE so that would make very interesting reading for you and others.
-Wayne
Yes, I had originally specified diatomaceous earth for the filter media, having had good results with that on land based swimming pools I have installed years ago, but Zeolite reportedly performs even better being able to both filter more out and also be more easily and completely cleaned by back flushing, so we are going to try that out and I will report the real world results of how well this performs in the coming months after we launch and start using our Delfin watermaker on a regular basis.
On Möbius, we don’t allow any shore side water onboard and generate all of our water via our 200L/hr Delfin watermaker so it will get a regular good workout every 4-6 days so we will have lots of data on the performance of the whole water making system, filters, pumps, etc. not too long after launch. We prefer this approach of water maker water only onboard for many reasons, the top ones being that we get to control and monitor the quality of all our onboard water and know for sure that there are no additives, chlorine, etc. which can cause problems with aluminium water tanks, watermaker membranes, pumps, seals, etc. By keeping all our water as close to pure H2O as possible, we eliminate or reduce most problems with onboard water supply and all its related systems. Time will tell how well this works so do stay tuned for more results as they happen.
-Wayne
Excellent blog and progress. I am now starting to see the end. I’ve now started to wonder if you have “ever” had Mr G actually running? If not yet, then that will be a big milestone.
Hi Wade & Diane. As per my answer to Max, we have not yet fired up Mr. Gee for the first time as I had hoped to do before installing him in Möbius. So this eXtremely big milestone now has to wait until after we launch and have a natural supply of sea water for the heat exchangers and wet exhaust system on Mr. Gee as well as being outside the building for the exhaust itself. That is all now looking to be a mere few weeks away so stay tuned for my upcoming update on the initial start up of Mr. Gee along with the even bigger milestone of launching Möbius!
-Wayne
Exciting to see.. Have you ever thought about “ecospeed”. That will last 10-25 years without painting? We are planning to put that on our aluminium hull. https://www.ecospeedsystems.nl/?lang=en or https://subind.net Here is also a good underwater electric brush we plan to use. Might take 30-40min to brush a 50-ft hull. https://remoramarine.com/remora-solo/ All The best & Good luck // Erik
Hi Erik and Happy New Year to you.
The EcoSpeed approach to dealing with bottom growth by making a very hard and sleek outer surface, is very appealing and one we considered though not EcoSpeed in particular at the time. We chose to go with the Foul Release approach using International InterSleek instead as we thought, rightly or wrongly, that making the surface not only sleek but also very slippery and “non-stick”, might make it much easier to remove the growth that is going to take place on either of these bottom treatments whenever the boat is not regularly being moved at speed through the water. Similar to what EcoSpeed recommends, we will clean off such growth from time to time by a combination of wiping it down while on anchor somewhere using our Hookah or Snuba type dive gear and our suction cup handle system the same we we have cleaned the hard antifoul bottoms on our previous boats and we also carry a pressure washer onboard that we can use when we are in areas with high enough tide ranges to dry out or on haul outs.
Getting exciting! Can’t wait to see all of this powered up and working!
Hey Steve and a very Happy New Year to you. We join you in not being able to wait to power up all these new systems on Möbius and get them all working. We fully expect there to be a good deal of “infant mortality” that you too know all to well when new systems and equipment is DOA or stops working or isn’t set up the way it should be. I’ve always lived life on “The No Plan Plan” so no dates for how long this will take but like you, Christine and I have long understood that you just do NOT go to sea until you have 100% confidence in the seaworthiness of your boat and so we will do ever larger loops out of Antalya and longer and longer sea trials to shake all the bugs and gremlins out in the open and deal with them while we have some good shore side support, shipping, stores, etc. We are now seeing the Launch Date as being a few weeks away rather than months and so we are hopeful that we would have Möbius seaworthy by late Spring here on the East end of the Med and be able to start making our way West. But of course we, like you, are all dependent upon the opening up of borders around the world to know when and where we can travel so we all have to take the same “wait and sea” mentality as to our boating adventures in 2021.
BTW, thanks much for your recent post on SeaBits of the new multi-purpose Cortex VHF, AIS, anchor watch ……… from Vesper. Your typically detailed and well written review that we have been waiting to read. I had left a detailed comment on that post and it seemed to through but upon re-reading the post the other day it was not there. But I noticed that you have had several others with similar problems with the “Disqus” comment management system and it did cause me a bunch of problems to get my comment written in the first place, so I will try again later as you get your new comment system up and running. As you might have read here on the Möbius.World posts, we had seriously considered putting a Cortex unit in our Tender but we were ordering that equipment almost a year ago now and felt that the Cortex system was still a bit too new and unproven for our use cases with our Tender so we went with the Vesper XB-8000 VHF-AIS unit along with some Airmar depth and bottom sounders.
Our intent and use case with our Tender is to use it, along with our Mavic Mini 2 drone to do some recon-runs through dodgy channels and bays to scout out the bottom topography while one of us stays on Mother Möbius to receive that data and make the Go/No Go decision to take Möbius through these spots, so we regard our Tender and its systems as part of our Safety kit on Möbius so all our decisions are very much mission critical safety ones and hence our decision to go with what we know and what is more proven out there in the real world of passage making. However that Cortex unit really is a break through product I think and very much redefines what we used to call a “VHF radio”. Quite similar to how a “mobile phone” has been redefined to our current smart phones and transformed to the point where the “telephone” aspect of these devices is the least used capability compared to being our go to camera, video recorder, web connection, hot spot, navigation, translater, …………………………
Anyway, both Christine and I grow all the more excited about the day when Rendezvous and Möbius can share an anchorage somewhere in the PNW someday soon so we can continue our conversations with you in person and onboard our boats. Not sure we can make that happen in 2021 but 2022 has a nice ring to it, so we’ll see and anxiously await that day.
-Wayne
So sorry your comment didn’t go through! It’s one of the reasons I’m ditching Disqus and doing something simpler and more reliable.
Your approach of doing things iteratively is one of my core beliefs – iterate often and frequently and build confidence in the system, whatever it may be. Learn from it, improve it, and understand it so you know it better than anyone else. Sounds like a lot of fun little trips and tweaks are in your future!
I think you made the right choice on the Cortex. Although it is a great product, it is a first generation one, and I’ve had my share of issues that would not be great to have if it was your only or primary communications channel. I think the design and the concept are fantastic, but it needs some time to work out issues with squelch, reliability, etc.
I’m looking forward to sharing an anchorage as well! We might end up needing a few weeks to get through all of our tech geekery, and of course I would like to sleep next to your Gardner at least for a night 🙂 I first heard of them in narrowboats in the UK, and had the fortunate chance years ago to spend a week on one and loved their amazingly robust and simple design. They are a work of art!
No worry Steve, Christine and I understand the challenges of maintaining a blog almost as well as you do and it too is an iterative process. Comments on blogs is a particularly troublesome issue to me and a particularly important one as the comment threads are often THE most valuable content of a blog. Unfortunately I don’t know of a great solution to this YET, but I think there is more and more attention being paid to this so I’m sure we will see major improvements in the coming months and years. As of now though, it sure is difficult to search the rich information in comment threads and what I’m hopeful of is that soon we can do a search that will at least pull up the specific comments that are relative to our search queries rather than just give me a list of blog posts that have something somewhere within them relative to my query.
I came away with the same conclusion you’ve summarized here on the Cortex, fabulous bit of kit but very much version 1.0 type at this point in time. However, as you clearly noted and added to the value of your post, Vesper has a track record and examples within your experience with them and the Cortex, of being genuinely focused on the very same iterative design approach you and I both prefer. THAT is a huge factor for me in choosing equipment! Knowing that I’m going with a manufacturer that most likely is going to be there for the foreseeable future AND will stand behind their product AND will be going after learning from each successive version and all their user feedback and applying this input to future versions of their hard and soft ware, are perhaps the biggest factors in my decision as to not only which models of equipment to chose but moreover which manufacturers to send my money to. There is still lots of competition and good choices of different companies to go with and Vesper is one of them for me and Möbius along with others such as Furuno, Maretron, Kabola, to name but a few.
Can’t wait for the opportunity to spend some time with you Steve, both to pick your brain all the more as well as to get to know you better because we sure have learned a LOT from you and all your great articles as we’ve gone about building and outfitting Möbius. Really looking forward to returning some of that favor with some good food and good wine aboard Möbius and Rendezvou and us four crew members in that gorgeous PNW area you so wisely chose to live and boat in and where I have so many fond memories of from my time there over the past decades.
Mr. Gee awaits you joining him in the Engine Room to sing you asleep with his gentle sounds of mechanical music and his gentle massaging throbs of those six bit pistons slowly moving up, down, up, down……….
Happy New Year
Glad to see you have a launch date – that’s exciting. Have you kept a record of the constructional man hours – or is that a “trade secret”. I did wonder about doing a similar project to you and even had an email dialog with Dennis in 2016 about my ideas. I have enjoyed following your blog but realise now what is involved in doing a project like this!!! Its a long haul.
Like others, I was wondering about the engine – will you start the engine in the shed (on a temporary cooling system?) or wait until the boat is in the water?
And what happened to the folding roof on the flybridge – was that a change to make the acrylic screens semi permanent?
Hi Nigel and Happy New Year to you as well.
I too have often wondered about what the person hour count would be for the design and building of Möbius. No “trade secret” at all, simply my lack of time and data to compile those totals. Maybe a case of self preservation on my part to preserve whatever might be left of my sanity as I’m sure the actual # of hours would be a bit scary! 😉 It is as you say “… a long haul” and I think the real “secret” is that it has to “float your boat” in that you enjoy the overall process of seemingly infinite problem solving and decision making with a LOT of relentless hard work and if that’s not the case you’d be wise to find another pursuit of the passions which drive you. I’m very fortunate in having always been driven by my curiosity, a love of learning and a penchant for designing and making things with my own ideas and hands. These personal passions and good fortune resulted in me having a huge range of different jobs since I was in my early teens and throughout my entire adult life and these all contributed to increase my experiential learning and development of more and more skills. I still have no idea what spark it was that ignited my interest in boats and sailing the seas but it does seem to fit me like the proverbial glove and as is my norm I just jumped feet first into my infinitely deep pool of ignorance and haven’t stopped treading water since. So for me, this latest project of designing and building Möbius has not felt like a long haul so much as a labour of love as I get to join forces with my incredible partner Christine to design and build our next floating home and magic carpet so we can continue to appreciate the wonder of this awemazing planet we are so fortunate to inhabit.
As per starting Mr. Gee, you are quite correct that it was my intent to be able to do the first start up and run in on a test bed with temporary fuel/water/exhaust setups. However, the demands of all the other aspects of the built consumed more and more of my time so Mr. Gee needed to be installed in the Engine Room before I had time to start him up and that has precluded me from having a way to deal with the exhaust mostly so his first startup will need to wait for a few more weeks until we Launch and are outside. This makes it easy to provide the necessary sea water for the heat exchangers and wet exhaust and I can run the whole exhaust system as it it intended to be so in that regard it becomes much easier to do the first startup. But not less exciting of a milestone to be sure!
As to the folding roof on the SkyBridge that all remains and the three front acrylic windows are very oxymoronically “semi-permanent” in that they have a small bead of Sikaflex around the edges of their aluminium U-channel frames which is quite easily severed with a bit of piano wire whenever we want to remove them to go into the hunkered down “Canal Mode” and lower the roof. This scheme evolved very naturally over the time of putting in the folding roof and figuring out the best way to do the windows. Christine and I delivered a number of sail and power boats over the years that had flybridges of various kinds and we noticed that there were almost no conditions, even in the most tropical heat and humidity, where we didn’t benefit from having at least some windows up in the front to deflect the wind, especially when underway. We also know that it will be a very low percentage of time with perhaps years in between, when we will have scenarios where we want to put Möbius into Canal Mode, either as the name implies or when leaving the boat for an extended time when she is up on the hard during cyclone season somewhere in the world. Therefore we figure that 98% of the time we will have the roof up and will want to have the front three windows always in place and so we designed the U-Channel frames and the removable vertical posts with this in mind and thus sealed them in with a thin bead of Sikaflex in such a way that we can easily get a length of piano wire in there to cut through the Sikaflext and pop out the whole acrylic window with its U-Channel frame in place. All the other 12 acrylic window panels can be put In/Out in seconds using the push up/pull out method I outlined in an earlier post using one of our suction cup type handles to grab onto each panel to pop them in or out of their top and bottom U-Channel frames.
Good eyes Nigel and thanks for keeping me on my toes! This is one of the major benefits for me of doing all these blog posts and having such dedicated and observant people such as yourself to catch my errors or inconsistencies or push me to re-think and check my logical reasons for doing things the way we are. All very much appreciated and valued so thanks to all of you for these contributions.
-Wayne