Boat Maintenance

Our 20-year-old Ideal windlass seemed a bit wimpy last fall, so we pulled it and took it back to the Ideal (www.idealwindlass.com) factory in Rhode Island for a rebuild. What a place! It looks like a set for a Charles Dickens movie. However, the work is great, and the windlass now seems to work as good as when it was new. The work was on time, and the cost was about a 10th of the price of a new one.

If you have a handheld NAMMO LIAB AB orange smoke distress signal onboard or in any of your ditch kits, remove it immediately. The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) recently announced that it has withdrawn its approval for the smoke signal, and it is now considered a Do Not Use product by the Coast Guard. According to a USCG safety alert, the manufacturer changed the signals chemical makeup in October 2013, without Coast Guard approval, and the current signal might spontaneously combust when dropped.

The news editor was old-school, skeptical of almost everything, so I was surprised when she dropped an envelope on my desk postmarked Fort Collins, Colo. Hurricane season forecast, she said. Make some sense out of it. Hes either lucky as hell, or knows something that the rest of us don't.

How much load does a keel bolt or a winch through-bolt put on a hull or a deck? How thick should the laminate be at these bolt holes? How big of a backing plate is needed?

The true test of marine gear is not whether it works when installed, but rather how it functions after years in the field. To that end, we have left samples of sewing materials and sewn test samples in the sun, wind, rain, and snow for two years, and have also sailed with sewn samples in service on our test boat.

Weve sewn our fair share of eyes in nylon webbing, but heres an easy no-sew alternative for creating a webbing strap with a buckle (shackle) that can be used for easily lashing down the dinghy, a battery, or even holding up your pants in a pinch. It is based on stuff a sailor has on hand-webbing, a chain link, and a shackle-and is as strong as professionally sewn ends, plus it can be untied after loading. It has tested at greater than 85-percent breaking strength and 100 percent of minimum rate strength, and it works on both nylon and ultra-high strength materials like Vectran webbing.

Responsible boatyard work requires dust collection. Whether its toxic bottom paint or ordinary sanding dust, it still makes a mess and can ruin a neighbors paint job-in-progress. Dustless sanders have hose connections leading to vacuum cleaners, but unless it is a sophisticated vacuum with multi-stage dust separation, those filters clog and dust flies.

Once upon a time in Tasmania, a skipper faced a daunting task: install a three-bladed, folding propeller without hauling out the boat. The underwater job would require an adhesive to secure some of the bolts, but which adhesives that were already on board would work best under water? To find out, PS contributor Jonathan Neeves decided to run a little adhesives test of the three products he had on hand-all commonly found at chandlers worldwide under the same or a similar brand.

We think of all stick-and-rip, hook-and-loop fasteners as Velcro-just as we ask for Kleenex after a sneeze-and most tend to have uniformly low performance expectations of these velcro products, assuming that they will have limited holding power from the beginning. These assumptions are not totally unwarranted. Velcro will inevitably be the first component of a canvas project to fail, with ultraviolet rays degrading the fine threads and holding strength dropping to zero within two to four years. When used to mount even the lightest equipment, the velcro fasteners vibrate loose without warning. The Velcros adhesive can slowly ooze off in heat, buckle in humidity, or simply turn to dust. So do any of them actually work? PS testers decided to find out.

Im confused about how to apply dielectric silicone compound or LPS-3 (spray) to electrical connections. These are dielectric substances (i.e., insulators), which would suggest that if you apply either one to the electrical terminals and then assemble the connection, you would increase the resistance, defeating your intentions. So should you just spray or spread it over a terminal block and consider it protected? Or does the compound get squeezed out sufficiently so that a good electrical connection is made?