The Queens Jubilee day for us

Seen here on a winters day and having a beer is Athol, skipper and owner of yacht Perazim, he joined us for a sail past the East Fort in Hout Bay to pay our respects to the Queen.

John off  Rosie Dry supplied the beer.

The HBYC posted some pictures as well

http://www.hbycclub.blogspot.com/

Another John, this time off yacht Polaris joined us too.

John was hanging on to Druma our dog for a while, we then put the life vest on Druma, we all relaxed a lot more then!

We had been informed that the East Fort's old cannons would be fired at 3pm, it never happened, we were back in the harbour by the time they fired them.

We at least flew some flags, at the back of the boat was the OCC Port Officers flag, from the starboard side we flew the South African, then Union flags, followed by the OCC, HBYC and TBA burgees.

How nice was this.

Roy

How to mill the top edge of a Hillman Imp Timing cover

The timing cover should be milled at the same time as the block should it be re surfaced? In this case it was forgotton and stood proud by about 0.008" or so?
When this is the case, the cylinder head gasket will not tighten level and the excess alloy must be removed.

The jig or template I made for the removal of alloy on the block edges has been re cut to expose the area over the timing chain cover. Even with bolts some distance away, the 32mm thick MDF (supawood) stays perfectly flat, note the plastic safety glasses, a must have when milling metal is concerned. Thinner MDF should also work, say down to 18mm thick but thicker is better.

Having done much smaller areas the day before, I knew this was going to work, the process was now understood and went very quickly. Do not over tighten the bolts, you may introduce distortion?

The Makita 3612 router, this model has an auto brake and stops very quickly, recomended!

The 13mm milling cutter, a tungsten tipped type will also work but the finish will not be as smooth?

The template will be stored away for other work on alloy Hillman Imp blocks.

The finished job, I took around three cuts to make the load on the milling cutter less, this way you can slowly move down to the required depth.

Click on the pictures, they should enlarge.

The milled Hillman Imp alloy block and timing cover. This fix cost me nothing, all the tools were to hand, scrap MDF was the template material and I did not have the expense of a machine shop or the traveling time there and back.

Next I will show you how I fitted the 998cc steel liners into the alloy sockets which had distorted some 0.003" ?

Works for me!

Roy

A Didi Retro 29 boat test (before we even build one)

Justin Phillips has really got his mind into the new design by Dudley Dix, so much so he seems to have been on the boat and sailing it in our local regattas!

Check the link: http://sayachts.blogspot.com/

Justin has been reviewing yachts by many designers that are South African specific, they were all built here, many were also designed by South Africans as well.

We will soon be cutting the kit for boat 001, it will be built locally and in
Hout Bay, South Africa.


Roy

Milling an Imp block, part three

This can all be done a pro machine shop but the idea in this case was to proove we can also do these small jobs ourselves. You need the tools of course but they have become very low priced these days, always by the best quality you can, not the lowest price.

Seen here we now just need to set the milling tool to the block face, the tool can not go any deeper.

I was able to secure the template using standard Hillman Imp head bolts once I had made up spacers from MDF offcuts.

This is the hardened steel 13mm milling bit, it cuts cleaner than a tungsten tipped router cutter.

The 3612 Makita router is an industrial grade machine, smaller sized tools will work but the ones that will take the 13mm cutter shaft will be best suited.

The excess weld as milled away, note the plastic glasses for eye protection.

The idea worked 100%, you will need to move the bolts around to allow the base of the router room to move. Do not overtighten the template bolts, distortion may be the result?

 

To be continued in part four.

Roy

Milling the top of an Imp engine block yourself

The idea to save the 998cc block was on that could either work or fail, given my time to myself was free and the parts were paid for, what can I loose? Three main issues were obvious, the steel liners no longer fitted the holes they came out of (numbered with a black felt tip pen) the top landing of the block needed machining flat and I needed to see if the block was flat or twisted?

I decided that taking it one job at a time was the best way to start, cleaning the top of the block would be my first task.

I wanted to use a large Makita router and a 13mm milling bit, tools in my workshop and right for the job.  The board under the gasket is 32mm MDF (supawood) and was perfect for using as a bolted down template on the top of the block. The gasket was the template for the cylinder head bolts I needed to use. The MDF in 32 mm was in stock, you could use thinner but the thicker will give better results due to its stiffness.

Drilled through with a 10mm twist bit, when vacumed clean we were ready for the next stage.

It is now jigsaw time, after setting out where the welds needed cleaning up, I could drill the cutouts corners and then saw the hole free.

Template and block are about to be bolted together after this stage.

When the template and block were together, the welds were seen to be accessable, the idea was then to mill the weld away with the milling tool.

Continues in part three.

Roy

How to mill a Hillman Imp block top edge after welding?

Part one:

This one came about after a Mk2 block with a 998cc conversion, saw damage after various complications with both the height of the liners and a sport wills ringed head that was not as perfect as was thought.

Check the three welds on the top edge of the Hillman Imp alloy 998cc block. All pictures should enlarge when you click on them.

The new steel liners in the block looked great, done by a local machine shop, it was to become a learning curve for all involved, I later prooved the linings had not been glued in level, they were out of level from 0.0005" to 0.003". I had them pressed out and refitted them myself with Loctite 648 bonding liquid, using a bolted down 170 series sport cylinder head that had been faced skimmed as the press tool.

The repair weld has been cleaned down  with a disc grinder to clean it up but still requires a final milling to the level of the block, note the hard steel thread insert.

This method prooved to work and I found the liners were at the required plus 0.002" hight above the block face after doing it my way. However, this was not the end of the story and the engine never did get sorted in time to ship to Scotland with its sprint prepared body. I was left holding the engine parts as a buy back of what they would cost in the UK, a gamble if they prooved to be of no use?

The block had cracked in two places when the head was tightened down.

It became a long story and right now one I will not cover fully, the issue became more could I get the parts with what was by now a three times welded alloy block to work? The machine shop called to say that the loose liners would no longer fit the bores in the block they came out of, they were out by around 0.003", I called the job off and then collected the engine in bits and brought them back to my own workshop.

The second crack. A damaged block like this may just be dumped in the UK but not here in South Africa, they are very scarce and in the case of this 998cc block, a great deal of money has been invested in it already.

 

 This was secondary welding, required as stop ends when we fitted the thread inserts, a few leaked due to thin metal on the inside of the block, so all thread ends were welded shut.

I then looked at the matter in a series of whats important (pun?) I fitted the crank, it turned ok but was less free than before welding, it will I hope bed in, we may end up doing a line bore job? I then needed to check the top landing, fitting a good cylinder head is a good way to start but there was excess welding on the top of the block that needed milling off, can I do that I thought!

Can this 998cc Imp block be made to run again?

Pictures (lots) and the rest of the story to follow in part two.

Roy

The Didi Retro 29 update

We now have the French marine ply at the CNC shop, plus the required cut files, so we can start on that side when the customer is ready for his kit. This will be in a week or so, as his builder has still to complete the garage extension the boat will be built in.

Dudley Dix supplied me with a 3D image he has placed on U Tube, click on the blue link to see it.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlE8Ut56jd0&feature=youtube_gdata .

Or you can also find it in the original blog below, with the report by Justin Phillips on the new design.

http://ckdboats.blogspot.com/2012/05/dix-designs-new-retro-29-is-announced.html

Soon to be built here in Hout Bay, South Africa.

Roy

Testing times for marine outboards

Justin and I decided to do a back to back outboard test using a broard range of old and new motors, the older one is fifty one (51) years old, the newer one about five or six years old?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt1kfgNpXcc&feature=youtube_gdata

The motors are a 3.5hp British Seagull, a 4.5 British Seagull, a 5hp Yamaha and a 2.5 Mercury, which will perform best on the same dinghy in the same time period?

 A winters day in South Africa, Justin is ready to be a judge in our very own PBO (practical boat owner) style outboard test.

The venue was Hout Bay Harbour,  the time around 11am, Justin  had brought his 15ft twin hulled GRP dinghy, his 5hp Yamaha was already fixed to the dinghy transom, It has just returned from a full service by the Anchor Boat Shop.

This class of dinghy is well suited to the test, as with two hulls its really stable. The 3.5hp Seagull is on the left and the 4.5hp Seagull on the right.

A similar Mercury 2.5hp to the one used, we found some interesting but not surprising results, the Yamaha 5hp was used first as it was on the boat already. For communication we used a pair of Icom M71 VHF handheld radios on a low setting, plus Justins Garmin V GPS, we then tried each engine to see what kind of top speed we could get?

 

The actual Mercury 2.5hp we tested was bought some while back in near new condition, I would guess its around ten years old but has very few hours on it. The performance was impressive from such a small motor.

Justin on our return to the slip, we are now two up and loaded with the four outboards, spare fuel and safety gear, this includes the 5hp Yamaha that is pushing us. With the boat empty and running on the far side of the harbour I recorded a speed at 10.1 knots. With that motor off and the smaller Mercury 2.5 hp fitted,  I saw a top speed of 5.6 knots, with just half the power, thats not a bad speed. The speed at a quarter half throttle was still around 4.3 knots.

The test with the two Seagulls prooved little, both had problems running at even half speed, we have been told by John of  http://www.save-our-seagulls.co.uk/ to check the Villiers carb jets. One was found to be quite blocked, now clean the motor runs well. The other Seagull is now on the bench and when thats running well we will continue the test, so keep an eye open for that blog.

Hout Bay Harbour is a part of the Table Mountain, Karbonkleberg nature conservation zone.

All pictures taken by R McBride, using a Canon G11 digital camera on an auto setting.

My thanks to Justin for the supply of his dinghy, outboard, GPS and for working out how
to do the U Tube from the video he made.

Roy

10/06/2012 , we have all motors now running well, Justin will return with his dinghy again and we will complete the test, we just need that same calm weather!

Teak and Holly boat flooring

I say Teak and Holly but its really Teak and White Ash, which is much more suitable for the job at hand. We will soon offer this ex stock or to special order by air freight, rolled in a cardboard tube.

The sheet is in veneer form and around 1mm thick, its a wood on wood product with a super thin bonding paper in between, thats not visible to the naked eye.

The sheet size is 2440mm x 1220mm ,we can recomend which twin pack lacquers will be the best to use. Remember, with wood flooring you are always walking on the clear finish and never the wood!

How good is that.

Update, the factory is running a test order with phenolic backer, this then gives us a very firm sheet similar to a sheet of Formica, easy to handle and a lot more stable.

Roy

Can your digital camera do forty million frames a second?

BBC World Service radio, frequency 12.095khz African Service.

I was listening to an Indian proffesor discusing the last twenty years of his work. I had missed the start of the program but could still grasp a part of what he was saying. What caught my attention was the fact they can record the work as its happening at 40,000,000 pictures per second!

As you can see, there is a central “barrel” portion, and two “forward disks”. The detectors themselves are rectangular, and, as the name implies, segmented into very small pixels about a tenth of a millimeter in size. That’s a lot larger than the pixel size in your digital camera. But this detector can take 40 million pictures a second, keeping the interesting ones and discarding the vast majority.

If we could strip away all the support frames, cooling, electronics, etc. from the pixel detectors, leaving only the detectors themselves, they would have an arrangement sort of like the diagram above.

What I ask can we do with 40 million pictures a second!  thats some camera.

Inside the machine, it passes under a few countries I believe.

The heart of the pixel detector is the readout chip, a silicon microchip specifically designed and fabricated for this detector, in this experiment. The effort to develop the readout chip was led by Roland Horisberger of the Paul Sherer Institut in Villigen, Switzerland. Each chip has over 4000 input channels arranged in a grid; each channel is bump-bonded to a sensor channel. The sensors are also very thin silicon wafers with one surface segmented into pixels. Each pixel channel can sense when a certain minimum amount of charge has been deposited by a passing charged particle, digitizes and time-stamps it, and sends it out onto the readout bus when a trigger signal matching the time stamp is received. All the thousands of readout chips in the detector do this in parallel, ultimately sending the torrent of data out on optical fibers to data acquisition electronics modules in the service cavern adjacent to the main detector cavern.

The PSI group built the central barrel portion of the CMS pixel detector, and the forward disks, which are somewhat more complicated mechanically, were built by a consortium of US universities and Fermilab. The forward disk detectors were assembled at Fermilab and then transported to CERN for final assembly, testing, and now installation.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/07/

Read the link for more on this story.

Roy

A comment in from a regular blog viewer in England.

That's all very interesting stuff but it must be costing a fortune and is completely unproductive as far as income, it just consumes money. The original idea of such a collider was to learn how to produce atomic fusion, we now have atomic fishion that power out nuke stations but this is a dirty business producing active waste that lasts thousands of years. If they could crack the fusion problem it would lead to unlimited power without the active waste problem so I wonder what they are messing about with pixel detectors for unless its to find out how to get the particles to collide in such mass that they get fusion? It's all terribly technical and employs thousands of boffin's.

Notty

The adjustment of points on a 4.5hp British Seagull

You can bring your Seagull to me to have it serviced, I now have the back up of a spares supplier, plus the workshop manual. The pictures are of a WSPC **** JJ6 model made in 1976.

The points are accessed by the removal of the top cover of the magneto.

The points are to be found at the end of the spring, set them to 0.20" or  0.50mm.

This is the coil that is charged by the revolving magnets of the magneto. See how new it still looks but the engine is a 1976 model, so all  of 36 years old!

Note, the timing is fixed, only the plug and points can be adjusted. If you change either setting, the timing will advance or retard, depending what you have done.

Roy

http://www.ckdboats.com/

Hands on boat building by George Buehler

I have never met George but we get on well enough by email and he sent me his must read book Buehlers Backyard Boatbuilding, this is a book for people like me.
Its not technical at all, just down to earth get out your old cloths and tools, then build yourself a boat. George has an ethic which says why use the best and new materials when we can build with recycled or a lower grade material.

From our side we looked at the timber required for the boats keel and hull frames, chosing to use local SA Pine, (radiata species) it was selected and twice treated with a CCA (copper) vacume application. This worked rather well, it saved a stack and we had prime timber to work with.

We recently discussed a much larger boat to the same design, done as a kit set here with all its materials, keel, stem, frames and rudder, we would send the kit boat to the client in Brasil.

Click on the page, it should open large enough to read it? otherwise I can send the scans to you by email.

About May 1999 I was contacted by a guy living in Zambia, he asked  would I build him a 38ft Diesel Duck in wood he asked? Seems he had discovered the TBA and when he asked around, some members recomended myself?

His wife came to see me and we discussed the venture, soon we had the plans and Georges building book, the pricing was done and an agreement made. I am not sure how Neil Rusch, the then editor of SA Yachting came into the picture but he had also done a story on a 50ft version which had been built in South Africa by a husband and wife team.

In the case of the 38ft Diesel Duck and in wood, our build was to be the very first in wood, all the others being made in steel but I have done this process before, use the designers steel boat plans and build a wood/epoxy boat.

When Neil arrived I was setting out in my small factory in Paarden Eiland, I later moved to a much larger shed in Cape Town Harbour to build the actual boat. Neil and I discussed the process and who else could use what I was doing? Costs were low, really low, using local materials for the frames and the first stage planking, then WBP plys, plus epoxies, we still had a materials cost under R80,000, just U$10,000 at todays exchange rate?

This boat was the very start of http://www.ckdboats.com/ as this was our first kit, the idea was to sell to fishing communities so that they could self build, their labour was free, the kit low cost and the boat very sea worthy.

The boat was launched and last I saw her was in FBYC waters, her name is Miss Pickles!

The story in more detail is here.  http://ckdboats.blogspot.com/2010/03/diesel-duck-38-traditional-build.html

Roy

Teak wood for sale

We have some of the best FEQ (first european quality)  in stock right now and in Cape Town. Bought to a higher grade and not down to a lower price, we also opted to have it kiln dried with lengths to 2.9mtrs x 50mm thick to 230mm wide.

We have about a half cubic meter, you will need more to do a laid teak deck like the one in the picture!  The boat was to be found at the Antigua Classic Regtta 2012 recently, I was sent the picture but with no name to who took it.

Roy

Wanted, the Sansui AU 555a amplifier

This was one of the best amplifiers at the time, I sold the contents of my appartment and the lease agreement to go off sailing back in 1977, I am still playing my vinyl  records using a Yamaha turntable and a Sony multifunction radio. A dedicated amplifier would be best.

Does anyone have a Sansui AU 555a amplifier for me. Naturally it must be in good working condition.

I am in Hout Bay, Cape Town, South Africa, contact me if you can help.

Roy

http://www.ckdboats.com/

The info on the set follows:

http://audio-database.com/SANSUI/amp/au-555a-e.html

The Integrated Amplifier of PB series which upgraded AU-555 and renewed the description and the design.

The whole page consists of silicon transistors.

The SEPP-ITL-OTL scheme of the pure complimentary darlington circuit which adopted the silicon transistor as the power transistor is adopted.

In order that an electrolytic capacitor may avoid the ill effect which it has on a music signal, as much as possible, using a hardwired-connection circuitry, a capacitor is lessened, and a required fraction makes a circuit impedance high and is using the Mylar capacitor.

Moreover, electrolysis connected the Mylar capacitor to the surely required fraction in parallel, and has improved the high region property.

The triple tone control of Bass, Midrange, and Treble is carried.

Moreover, since it is an it1 step type control, a special NetWare program and a more exact correction of a room acoustic can be performed.

Basics on the Sansui 555 au  amplifier.

Power output: 50 watts per channel into 8 ohms

Harmonic distortion: less than 0.5%
Frequency response: 20 to 80,000Hz
Channel separation: 50dB
Output impedance: 4 to 16 ohms
Dimensions: 15 x 4 3/8 x 10 7/8"

Weight: 17.4ibs



Update, December 7th 2012

This far I have had two replies, one was in South Africa, that was so expensive it was just not acceptable, another comes from Brasil, a nice one owner amp but again the cost to ship will just price it out of where I want to be!

Roy