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#1
Precision / Re: Resuscitating a 1993 Preci...
Last post by Riggerdood - Jul 26, 2024, 10:11 PMWelcome Papaw! You've made a great choice for a starter boat. Trailer repair is fairly straightforward, as they all (mostly) use the same parts, just different shapes and sizes. The same can be said for sailboats in many cases. What are you seeing on the boat itself that needs repair?
#2
Precision / Resuscitating a 1993 Precision...
Last post by PapawBrett - Jul 26, 2024, 08:21 PMRetired, widower and starting into sailing with a 31 year old Precision 15 footer. Seems like everything I look at means more to fix. So far it's all trailer repair. Hopefully within a week I'll have that straightened out and will be up to the boat.
Any suggestions or advice on old PBW 15' would be appreciated, thanks. Papaw
Any suggestions or advice on old PBW 15' would be appreciated, thanks. Papaw
#3
TSBB General Talk / Re: Almost-A-SCAMP Progress Re...
Last post by Wayne Howard - Jul 26, 2024, 06:59 PMOver-engineered or under-utilized? Depends on your perspective. Keep the reports coming, Charles.
#4
TSBB General Talk / Riley, know the feeling well ....
Last post by Charles Brennan - Jul 26, 2024, 06:25 PMRiley, I had really mixed feelings the first time I saw where they condemned and tore down a high-rise building I had worked on in the 70's. At the time, we thought that was really IT, the best mix of Cool and Hi-Tech and would last forever. "Forever" turned out to be about 38 years.
Made me wonder about my Life Choices, realizing I had spent my life and my career, building the Slums Of The Future.
At least, your work ended up in the Graveyards of the Deep and possibly even something useful, like an artificial reef. All my work ended in a brief explosion, a lot of dust and hauled-away debris, leaving no trace that my labors ever existed.
Been There, Done That; wiped up the sweat with the tee-shirt,
Charles Brennan
Made me wonder about my Life Choices, realizing I had spent my life and my career, building the Slums Of The Future.
At least, your work ended up in the Graveyards of the Deep and possibly even something useful, like an artificial reef. All my work ended in a brief explosion, a lot of dust and hauled-away debris, leaving no trace that my labors ever existed.
Been There, Done That; wiped up the sweat with the tee-shirt,
Charles Brennan
#5
TSBB General Talk / Re: Almost-A-SCAMP Progress Re...
Last post by jack jackson - Jul 26, 2024, 06:12 PMLongtime lurker, infrequent poster here. Im really enjoying your updates. The whole Scamp concept is really cool to me.
#6
TSBB General Talk / Almost-A-SCAMP Progress Report...
Last post by Charles Brennan - Jul 26, 2024, 05:51 PMOdds & Ends
About 35 years ago, with some rewards coupons burning a hole in my pocket, I bought a pair of teak magazine racks.
I removed the teak plug in the middle stave, unscrewed the screw and relocated it lower, put the screw back in and put in a new teak plug.
I also took a teak slat and installed it between the uprights, level with the bottom of the top stave to make a shallow shelf.
You cannot view this attachment.
After oiling, they came out like this:
Most useful for storing stuff and nice to have close at hand on either side of the companionway.
(Port.)
You cannot view this attachment.
Gave Urchin some badly needed organization.
(Starboard.)
You cannot view this attachment.
Well, the Irish Pennant is going to need even more organization and since it's a smaller boat, I figured I could get away with just one shelf.
(OK, I hedged my bets a little, and made it 15" wide, instead of 12" wide.)
Prototyped in cardboard, since this was not one of your 3-D everything's 90º shelves, like the teak racks were.
3/8" Okoume, instead of ½-inch teak, but after all, it IS a smaller boat!
Having teak shelving in a space that will be mostly closed up, leaned more toward painted plywood, rather than oiled teak.
The hull is curved top to bottom and also curved fore to aft.
You cannot view this attachment.
That curve at right, conforms to the inside of the hull inside the cabin (BH-3).
That appearance of being wider at the front than at the back, is NOT camera foreshortening distortion; that's how much the hull curve changes in 15".
You cannot view this attachment.
Nice thing about fabricating in composite plywood and epoxy:
All mistakes can be filled in and smoothed over before painting.
You cannot view this attachment.
View from the rear of the shelf.
Where it will be finally installed.
Clears the cabin opening nicely, and keeps everything right at hand instead of rolling around loose in the bottom of the cabin.
You cannot view this attachment.
Being able to sell Urchin is also part of SCAMP progress, even going as far as re-building a perfectly clean carburetor.
You cannot view this attachment.
Due to misdiagnosing engine missing as a dirty carb, when really, it was a busted cam follower.
You cannot view this attachment.
New one mounted, with old one on bench.
Amazingly, as bad as that was, affecting the throttle plate and all, the motor still got me through the week on a recent FL120.
I decided I didn't want to have to fish out a pair of pliers every time I wanted to install or remove the ballast tank plug.
So I drilled a hole in the plug and made me a handle of some 5/32 copper tube. The first attempt was too weak and the tubing bent far too easily to be reliable in use.
I stiffened the tube by jamming in copper wire strands until it was a little more solid feeling.
You cannot view this attachment.
Then I sweated some solder into each end (sucked up a surprising amount of solder) and onto the fitting itself, to hold everything in place. Solder made it much stiffer.
You cannot view this attachment.
Trimmed off the ends and ground them smooth(er).
Finished it off with some white heat shrink tubing.
Why not black heat shrink?
The ballast tank is going to be finished with graphite in the epoxy and will be black in appearance, so the white handles will be easier to see until it predictably, gets grundged up.
You cannot view this attachment.
Power:
I know from years of cruising, that the sweet spot for batteries (for me) is 100 A/Hr.
With a 30 watt solar panel and an efficient charge controller, even using LED Nav lights, a tiller pilot, a CPAP machine on an inverter, and Mama charging up every USB device in her possession, my power consumption is still less than my solar replenishment.
So I can stay out pretty much indefinitely, when I'm cruising.
That's about to get a pretty severe test, since the new sailboat is also going to sport a trolling motor, one last seen on Urchin from 1992 to 1995, where it was my sole motor propulsion.
(The Japanese had run British Seagull out of the outboard motor market and I couldn't get parts any more and had to abandon my Silver Century Plus.)
So I'm going to start sucking up watts again, pretty heavily, creating a lot of unknowns for me, power-wise.
I can mitigate that somewhat with LiFePO batteries which run a lot farther than lead-acid, before flaking out.
I can also switch from 30 to 90 watts of solar panel charging, in nearly the same space currently used by the 30 watt panel.
Things really get much better, every 25 years, or so!
I don't know if that will give me consumption/replenishment equilibrium or not, but that's how I'm planning it, until I can actually get Out There and get me some Numbers.
Can't really use a 100 A/Hr battery, though. Won't fit anywhere in the boat, hardly.
But! I CAN use two 50 A/Hr batteries in parallel and have them fit in the nooks and crannies available to me.
Here is a cardboard mock-up of the typical average size of 50 A/Hr batteries and I'll have one on each side of that bulkhead.
They weigh 25 pounds total, and will be right next to the water ballast tank, because, why not?
Need all the ballast stability, I can GET!!
You cannot view this attachment.
The batteries will be secured with a 1" nylon strap with buckles, from all my kayak hardware.
It will be threaded through that hole (that needs far more filing than I thought, before I posted this pic!) and around the front of the batteries and looped through cleats on either side of the two batteries.
You cannot view this attachment.
Here are the 5" cleats with two-inch pieces that I'm going to glue together and then glue to the bulkhead in both compartments.
The inside edge will be rounded over so the strap doesn't chafe, but I won't do that until after it is primed with epoxy.
You cannot view this attachment.
The nylon strap will loop though the cleat, go across the front of the battery, through the bulkhead hole and then around the front of the other battery, loop through the other cleat and then return to the buckle in front, somewhere.
You cannot view this attachment.
Turning my attention to the bow, I needed more wood for attaching the front bow chock.
Has another one of those
b@$tard multiple angles plus the bow curves, so a lot of cutting, grinding, fitting, sanding, and eyeball engineering, was involved.
You cannot view this attachment.
But it eventually got whittled into shape.
You cannot view this attachment.
Now that I know it fits, I'll unscrew it for priming and gluing in place.
Not shabby!
You cannot view this attachment.
Mast:
Been going back and forth about the mast.
The trade-offs are wood, which is difficult to make by yourself, versus aluminum, which is hideously expensive.
Also of interest was that wood masts are typically 16- 20 pounds, and the aluminum mast supplied by Gig Harbor is only 11 pounds.
This whole project began because I was all done dealing with a 60-pound mast, at my age; 20 pounds, I can live with easily.
There have also been several wooden mast failures in the SCAMP community and now they are beefing them up (near the mast partners) and that was also cause for some concern.
I WANTED aluminum, but resigned myself to probably building in wood.
UNTIL I saw on Face Book, where a West Coast Trailer Sailing Squadron guy mentioned he had a mast and boom laying around from a scrapped project and did anybody have some use for it?
Umm . . . . Yes, Please!
So I drove 2½ hours down the road (everything is 2½ hours down the road, up here) and found this:
You cannot view this attachment.
A 20-foot mast and a 10 foot boom off a 16-foot Luger Leeward.
SCORE!!
Got some measurements off it and discovered it is basically a Dwyer DM-284 extrusion.
The wall thickness on the Gig Harbor mast is .065" and this one is .12" not quite 1/8-inch.
Dwyer reports the weight as .908 lb/ft so, times 16 feet comes to 14½ lb, which is the same or less than most wooden masts and only 3½ lbs more, than a Gig Harbor mast.
I can live with that, especially since it was my favorite price: FREE!
His only stipulation was to send him pics of it, when I was done. (Like, anyone could stop me!)
I was going to bring it home and immediately start working on modifying it, but as in all things with sailboats, Mother Nature always gets a vote.
Ah, well.
You cannot view this attachment.
The next day I began stripping hardware off the spars, with predictable enough results.
You cannot view this attachment.
But with the help of a lot of PB-Blaster, WD-40, and a propane torch, I finally got the spars stripped of extraneous hardware and stored, until I'm ready to deal with them.
You cannot view this attachment.
Saved all the hardware, because some of it will be re-used and re-purposed.
You cannot view this attachment.
The SCAMP uses a 16 foot mast; no problem there, just hack off the lower 4 feet.
BUT, it has a 12 foot boom . . . . . Hmmmm . . . .
However, the boom and the mast are built from the same extrusion, so if I could get some 6061-T6 tubing of just the right diameter, I could insert it inside, coated with epoxy and pop-riveted and have it spliced.
Of course those rivets and seams will make it look like Franken-boom, but the aluminum spars on SCAMPs have huge heat shrink tubing or leather-laced wraps where the spars touch, to prevent chafe.
Get the splice in just the right place and it might get covered over with the heat shrink and not even be a problem.
More research shows the tack to clew distance on the sail is 118 inches.
Hmmm . . . . . the fittings on each end of the boom are 120" apart, so I need to get my hands on a sail, before I actually start hacking and splicing and whatnot.
I need to find out what all 12 of those feet are getting used for and just how much is really needed, and why.
I see a fair amount of wood sticking out on the ends on some of those SCAMP pics.
And it's not like I have to do that this week; still plenty of other stuff to assemble and prime and glue and fiberglass and, and, and . . . . .
And a final question:
My definition of a Bore, is someone who deprives you of Solitude, without providing you with Company.
I've been writing about this project fairly heavily, since this is where I'm headed for in sailing/cruising, in Encroaching Old Fogey-dom.
Are these posts getting boring, or is there still some interest?
Charles Brennan
About 35 years ago, with some rewards coupons burning a hole in my pocket, I bought a pair of teak magazine racks.
I removed the teak plug in the middle stave, unscrewed the screw and relocated it lower, put the screw back in and put in a new teak plug.
I also took a teak slat and installed it between the uprights, level with the bottom of the top stave to make a shallow shelf.
You cannot view this attachment.
After oiling, they came out like this:
Most useful for storing stuff and nice to have close at hand on either side of the companionway.
(Port.)
You cannot view this attachment.
Gave Urchin some badly needed organization.
(Starboard.)
You cannot view this attachment.
Well, the Irish Pennant is going to need even more organization and since it's a smaller boat, I figured I could get away with just one shelf.
(OK, I hedged my bets a little, and made it 15" wide, instead of 12" wide.)
Prototyped in cardboard, since this was not one of your 3-D everything's 90º shelves, like the teak racks were.
3/8" Okoume, instead of ½-inch teak, but after all, it IS a smaller boat!
Having teak shelving in a space that will be mostly closed up, leaned more toward painted plywood, rather than oiled teak.
The hull is curved top to bottom and also curved fore to aft.
You cannot view this attachment.
That curve at right, conforms to the inside of the hull inside the cabin (BH-3).
That appearance of being wider at the front than at the back, is NOT camera foreshortening distortion; that's how much the hull curve changes in 15".
You cannot view this attachment.
Nice thing about fabricating in composite plywood and epoxy:
All mistakes can be filled in and smoothed over before painting.
You cannot view this attachment.
View from the rear of the shelf.
Where it will be finally installed.
Clears the cabin opening nicely, and keeps everything right at hand instead of rolling around loose in the bottom of the cabin.
You cannot view this attachment.
Being able to sell Urchin is also part of SCAMP progress, even going as far as re-building a perfectly clean carburetor.
You cannot view this attachment.
Due to misdiagnosing engine missing as a dirty carb, when really, it was a busted cam follower.
You cannot view this attachment.
New one mounted, with old one on bench.
Amazingly, as bad as that was, affecting the throttle plate and all, the motor still got me through the week on a recent FL120.
I decided I didn't want to have to fish out a pair of pliers every time I wanted to install or remove the ballast tank plug.
So I drilled a hole in the plug and made me a handle of some 5/32 copper tube. The first attempt was too weak and the tubing bent far too easily to be reliable in use.
I stiffened the tube by jamming in copper wire strands until it was a little more solid feeling.
You cannot view this attachment.
Then I sweated some solder into each end (sucked up a surprising amount of solder) and onto the fitting itself, to hold everything in place. Solder made it much stiffer.
You cannot view this attachment.
Trimmed off the ends and ground them smooth(er).
Finished it off with some white heat shrink tubing.
Why not black heat shrink?
The ballast tank is going to be finished with graphite in the epoxy and will be black in appearance, so the white handles will be easier to see until it predictably, gets grundged up.You cannot view this attachment.
Power:
I know from years of cruising, that the sweet spot for batteries (for me) is 100 A/Hr.
With a 30 watt solar panel and an efficient charge controller, even using LED Nav lights, a tiller pilot, a CPAP machine on an inverter, and Mama charging up every USB device in her possession, my power consumption is still less than my solar replenishment.
So I can stay out pretty much indefinitely, when I'm cruising.
That's about to get a pretty severe test, since the new sailboat is also going to sport a trolling motor, one last seen on Urchin from 1992 to 1995, where it was my sole motor propulsion.
(The Japanese had run British Seagull out of the outboard motor market and I couldn't get parts any more and had to abandon my Silver Century Plus.)
So I'm going to start sucking up watts again, pretty heavily, creating a lot of unknowns for me, power-wise.
I can mitigate that somewhat with LiFePO batteries which run a lot farther than lead-acid, before flaking out.
I can also switch from 30 to 90 watts of solar panel charging, in nearly the same space currently used by the 30 watt panel.
Things really get much better, every 25 years, or so!
I don't know if that will give me consumption/replenishment equilibrium or not, but that's how I'm planning it, until I can actually get Out There and get me some Numbers.
Can't really use a 100 A/Hr battery, though. Won't fit anywhere in the boat, hardly.
But! I CAN use two 50 A/Hr batteries in parallel and have them fit in the nooks and crannies available to me.
Here is a cardboard mock-up of the typical average size of 50 A/Hr batteries and I'll have one on each side of that bulkhead.
They weigh 25 pounds total, and will be right next to the water ballast tank, because, why not?
Need all the ballast stability, I can GET!!
You cannot view this attachment.
The batteries will be secured with a 1" nylon strap with buckles, from all my kayak hardware.
It will be threaded through that hole (that needs far more filing than I thought, before I posted this pic!) and around the front of the batteries and looped through cleats on either side of the two batteries.
You cannot view this attachment.
Here are the 5" cleats with two-inch pieces that I'm going to glue together and then glue to the bulkhead in both compartments.
The inside edge will be rounded over so the strap doesn't chafe, but I won't do that until after it is primed with epoxy.
You cannot view this attachment.
The nylon strap will loop though the cleat, go across the front of the battery, through the bulkhead hole and then around the front of the other battery, loop through the other cleat and then return to the buckle in front, somewhere.
You cannot view this attachment.
Turning my attention to the bow, I needed more wood for attaching the front bow chock.
Has another one of those
b@$tard multiple angles plus the bow curves, so a lot of cutting, grinding, fitting, sanding, and eyeball engineering, was involved.You cannot view this attachment.
But it eventually got whittled into shape.
You cannot view this attachment.
Now that I know it fits, I'll unscrew it for priming and gluing in place.
Not shabby!
You cannot view this attachment.
Mast:
Been going back and forth about the mast.
The trade-offs are wood, which is difficult to make by yourself, versus aluminum, which is hideously expensive.
Also of interest was that wood masts are typically 16- 20 pounds, and the aluminum mast supplied by Gig Harbor is only 11 pounds.
This whole project began because I was all done dealing with a 60-pound mast, at my age; 20 pounds, I can live with easily.
There have also been several wooden mast failures in the SCAMP community and now they are beefing them up (near the mast partners) and that was also cause for some concern.
I WANTED aluminum, but resigned myself to probably building in wood.
UNTIL I saw on Face Book, where a West Coast Trailer Sailing Squadron guy mentioned he had a mast and boom laying around from a scrapped project and did anybody have some use for it?
Umm . . . . Yes, Please!
So I drove 2½ hours down the road (everything is 2½ hours down the road, up here) and found this:
You cannot view this attachment.
A 20-foot mast and a 10 foot boom off a 16-foot Luger Leeward.
SCORE!!
Got some measurements off it and discovered it is basically a Dwyer DM-284 extrusion.
The wall thickness on the Gig Harbor mast is .065" and this one is .12" not quite 1/8-inch.
Dwyer reports the weight as .908 lb/ft so, times 16 feet comes to 14½ lb, which is the same or less than most wooden masts and only 3½ lbs more, than a Gig Harbor mast.
I can live with that, especially since it was my favorite price: FREE!
His only stipulation was to send him pics of it, when I was done. (Like, anyone could stop me!)
I was going to bring it home and immediately start working on modifying it, but as in all things with sailboats, Mother Nature always gets a vote.
Ah, well.
You cannot view this attachment.
The next day I began stripping hardware off the spars, with predictable enough results.
You cannot view this attachment.
But with the help of a lot of PB-Blaster, WD-40, and a propane torch, I finally got the spars stripped of extraneous hardware and stored, until I'm ready to deal with them.
You cannot view this attachment.
Saved all the hardware, because some of it will be re-used and re-purposed.
You cannot view this attachment.
The SCAMP uses a 16 foot mast; no problem there, just hack off the lower 4 feet.
BUT, it has a 12 foot boom . . . . . Hmmmm . . . .
However, the boom and the mast are built from the same extrusion, so if I could get some 6061-T6 tubing of just the right diameter, I could insert it inside, coated with epoxy and pop-riveted and have it spliced.
Of course those rivets and seams will make it look like Franken-boom, but the aluminum spars on SCAMPs have huge heat shrink tubing or leather-laced wraps where the spars touch, to prevent chafe.
Get the splice in just the right place and it might get covered over with the heat shrink and not even be a problem.
More research shows the tack to clew distance on the sail is 118 inches.
Hmmm . . . . . the fittings on each end of the boom are 120" apart, so I need to get my hands on a sail, before I actually start hacking and splicing and whatnot.
I need to find out what all 12 of those feet are getting used for and just how much is really needed, and why.
I see a fair amount of wood sticking out on the ends on some of those SCAMP pics.
And it's not like I have to do that this week; still plenty of other stuff to assemble and prime and glue and fiberglass and, and, and . . . . .
And a final question:
My definition of a Bore, is someone who deprives you of Solitude, without providing you with Company.
I've been writing about this project fairly heavily, since this is where I'm headed for in sailing/cruising, in Encroaching Old Fogey-dom.
Are these posts getting boring, or is there still some interest?
Charles Brennan
#7
TSBB General Talk / Починка подвески машины – важн...
Last post by Antoniodum - Jul 26, 2024, 04:33 PMЖаждете знать, как правильно отремонтировать подвеску вашего машины также избежать дорогих ошибок? Наша статья по ремонту подвески – это ваше идеальное руководство! Мы тщательно расскажем что касается абсолютно всех шагах починки, подскажем, как диагностировать проблемы и отобрать качественные запчасти. Узнайте, как продлить срок службы подвески вашего автомобиля и обеспечить безопасность на дороге. Не упустите шанс сделать лучше состояние вашего авто – переходите по гиперссылке и читайте статью!
#8
Precision / Re: Trailer brakes and sway ba...
Last post by Krusen - Jul 26, 2024, 10:41 AMMy MacGregor 22 would be near the same size and weight as your rig. I had hydraulic surge brakes, This gave a maximum of about 200 pounds of "push" on whatever tow vehicle I used,
No special equipment on the vehicle itself, and no special skills to use it properly. Only downsides, brake overheating on long downgrades, due to trailer matching engine braking. Backing uphill will also set the brakes, but this can be prevented by inserting a pin to disable the brakes.
Sway bars are pretty much un necessary if you have proper tongue weight, and fully inflated tires. The tires on the trailer were 6 ply rated.
Strap the boat down tight, so it cannot rock with side gusts from wind or passing vehicles I had a straight down strap at the bow eye, in addition to the bow winch, ratchet straps at the stern corners, and a REAL truckers 3 inch ratchet strap across the front of the cockpit.
I pulled that trailer thousands of miles, mostly at speeds above 50 and as high as 80, mixed 2 way traffic and Interstate, with no adventures or surprises.
Tow vehicles ranged from a Taurus SHO, tow rated at zero, to a Ford Ranger pickup with simple bumper hitch, and a big GMC Sierra with tow package and monster V8 engine. Properly set up trailer towed much the same behind them all. Maintaining the speed limit on I70 over the Appalachian mountains was a challenge with the little Ranger, but the right gear did it, (stick shift).
No special equipment on the vehicle itself, and no special skills to use it properly. Only downsides, brake overheating on long downgrades, due to trailer matching engine braking. Backing uphill will also set the brakes, but this can be prevented by inserting a pin to disable the brakes.
Sway bars are pretty much un necessary if you have proper tongue weight, and fully inflated tires. The tires on the trailer were 6 ply rated.
Strap the boat down tight, so it cannot rock with side gusts from wind or passing vehicles I had a straight down strap at the bow eye, in addition to the bow winch, ratchet straps at the stern corners, and a REAL truckers 3 inch ratchet strap across the front of the cockpit.
I pulled that trailer thousands of miles, mostly at speeds above 50 and as high as 80, mixed 2 way traffic and Interstate, with no adventures or surprises.
Tow vehicles ranged from a Taurus SHO, tow rated at zero, to a Ford Ranger pickup with simple bumper hitch, and a big GMC Sierra with tow package and monster V8 engine. Properly set up trailer towed much the same behind them all. Maintaining the speed limit on I70 over the Appalachian mountains was a challenge with the little Ranger, but the right gear did it, (stick shift).
#9
TSBB General Talk / Miss USS Tarawa
Last post by Riley Smith - Jul 26, 2024, 10:23 AMIt was the early seventies when I worked on the USS Tarawa. (LHA1) The ship was in modules, not yet a complete hull. Resources were being attributed to boats already in the water, and as such we mostly laid out the insulation scheme. Shot pins, etc
There weren't many people assigned yet, and you at least knew who was who. One day there was a heart attack emergency and they hauled an old chipper off the boat. He didn't make it. He was a good old guy and I always liked to chat with him.
In one of the modules near the bow, someone had drawn Miss Tarawa in all her naked glory on the inside of the exterior hull. Great work too. I wonder if she is still there, under the ocean. They sank her a few days ago, off Hawaii, in a military drill. That'll make you feel old!
There weren't many people assigned yet, and you at least knew who was who. One day there was a heart attack emergency and they hauled an old chipper off the boat. He didn't make it. He was a good old guy and I always liked to chat with him.
In one of the modules near the bow, someone had drawn Miss Tarawa in all her naked glory on the inside of the exterior hull. Great work too. I wonder if she is still there, under the ocean. They sank her a few days ago, off Hawaii, in a military drill. That'll make you feel old!
#10
Precision / Re: Trailer brakes and sway ba...
Last post by Brian N. - Jul 26, 2024, 09:40 AMTalbot: Remember that Toyota and other companies in general adhere to the "Cover your butt" policy. They are avoiding lawsuits. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to have them anyway. In my opinion being conservative concerning safety is a good idea. I sold my Volvo and purchased a Subaru Outback to tow my P165 partly because the Subaru had a better tow capacity.