Almost-A-SCAMP Progress Report #7C . . . .

[Charles Brennan]

Odds & 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.
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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.)
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Gave Urchin some badly needed organization.
(Starboard.)
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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.
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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". 
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Nice thing about fabricating in composite plywood and epoxy:
All mistakes can be filled in and smoothed over before painting.   

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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.
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Being able to sell Urchin is also part of SCAMP progress, even going as far as re-building a perfectly clean carburetor.
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Due to misdiagnosing engine missing as a dirty carb, when really, it was a busted cam follower.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!!   
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But it eventually got whittled into shape.
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Now that I know it fits, I'll unscrew it for priming and gluing in place.

Not shabby! 
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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:
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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.   
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The next day I began stripping hardware off the spars, with predictable enough results.   
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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.
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Saved all the hardware, because some of it will be re-used and re-purposed.
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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

[jack jackson]

Longtime lurker, infrequent poster here. Im really enjoying your updates. The whole Scamp concept is really cool to me.

[Wayne Howard]

Over-engineered or under-utilized? Depends on your perspective. Keep the reports coming, Charles.

[Frank B.]

I find the use of "Misdiagnose", "Repurpose", "Adapt" and the occasional "that didn't work out all that well", to be relatable.  Was very interested in the battery section.  Had to do kinda the same thing on my skiff.  Started out with a lawn tractor battery, just not enough to do the job once I added a trolling motor of about the same age, worked it out and only I can probably find it.  Please forge ahead, I'm at that point where I may need to come to the same conclusion, i.e., aged out of the not so large sailboat but too large for me........

[Spot]

I heard someone at school talking about making an add-on kit for a bow on those Scamps

Nice progress report and great find on the spars.

[Krusen]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Woke around 6 this morning, and read your excellent report, then back to bed.  So, technically, you put me to sleep.

Your mast game reminds me of my temporary mast for the Mac 22, which was broken at the spreaders by an adventure with a tree limb, previous owner.

I spliced it with an upper mast section from a day sailor, sail track matched exactly, the rest overlapped inside the larger Mac mast.  With spreaders and other hardware properly installed, good to go, and sailed like that until I found a Catalina mast, and adapted it to the Mac.

Your progress may be slow, but it is much faster than I move these days.

KRUSE'N
Without a cruiser.

[Noemi - Ensenada 20]

67 views so far....probably not bored yet. 

[Timm R Oday25]

Charles , I follow along with your reports .I'm looking forward to the day when ,
I also have the time to devote our boats .
In the meantime please keep posting .

[Captain Kidd]

Charles, most if not all of us know the amount of time it takes to make such posts. I read them all (well - most of them) with great interest. They are certainly thorough, informative, inspirational, entertaining, and (as someone already noted) relatable. Keep 'em comin'.

Looking forward to your Scamp progress and I really hope we can sail together at Cedar Key!  What say we shoot for 2025, maybe the fall?

[rfrance0718]

Keep writing. It's a great thing to read about this kind of problem solving. Reading about your solutions gives me hope that I'm not totally crazy.

Batteries; My boat battery works great with my 50w solar panel. Only problem I have is running the gps at night. It's a power hog, but it doesn't need to be on continuously.

I'm just starting to look into Lithium for my camper. I've given up on using my fridge in the propane mode. One 100 ah lead acid will only run the fridge for 5 hours or so. Space is an issue.

I've read some stuff that has only caused confusion so far.

[Norm L.]

The battery game is confusing. I've been following it and doing some writing on it. It seems to come down to using the exact type battery that fits your exact need. Any time you want to favor one factor, like weight, recharge time, power, cost, safety, lifetime, it will reduce the plus one of the other needs.
One interesting piece of news is that the first battery powered tugboat is using the same battery as is used in Teslas. One of the reasons is its high safety rating and its ready availability.
The tug is rated at 5700 Hp and the battery banks weigh 31 tons and are in separate high-capacity air-conditioned rooms. This will probably not work on a trailer boat.   

[Captain Kidd]

The tug is rated at 5700 Hp and the battery banks weigh 31 tons and are in separate high-capacity air-conditioned rooms. This will probably not work on a trailer boat.   

 

[rfrance0718]

Tug seems like great use for batteries. Work all day, charge all night, or something like it.

[Norm L.]

The 2 new ones are set up like that. They both have a small generator as back up.
The big plus is on harbor tugs that dock ships. It used to be big at 3500-4000 HP and now is at 6000+ in the big ports that get the huge container ships and large tankers and bulk carriers.
You need that HP while docking a big ship for maybe 20-30 minuets in an hour of work. Moving around the harbor ship to ship or dock to dock you need 600 HP. Each of the big diesels can be more than $1.5MM. So you get smaller generator diesels and still get the desired thrust through electric motors. And the thrust is instant.
The new tugs are quite expensive but over time there are great savings in fuel and engine maintenance. Also, estimated 10 years before replacement of the battery banks. (In theory)

[Wayne Howard]

Add in independenyly steered 360 degree azipod lower units and you get some really neat maneuverability.