Boat Maintenance

I was wondering if you folks have ever evaluated the various kinds of plywood for use in marine environments. Needing to replace a bulkhead, I went plywood shopping with a friend. Its his belief that theres little difference between regular plywood and marine plywood, other than the price. He says its all the same glue, and that different glue wouldnt matter because wood is wood and it all delaminates the same when exposed to water. What are your thoughts?

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the desert at night and reflected upon how much the wide expanses of sand and rock in the American Southwest resemble the sea-especially after the sun has set. Away from the loom of the lights of Moab, Utah, my wife and I stood in an empty parking lot looking to the east, where the pyramid peaks of the La Sal mountains were silhouetted by the light of the full moon, still invisible below the horizon. Wed arrived to Arches National Park at night, driving through the blackness, following our headlights to the third or fourth pullout on the winding road into the park. We missed the sign identifying the pullout, so the geographical feature that the viewpoint was meant to serve remained a mystery.

Sailors looking for a chartplotter who tend to stray from the beaten path or those who spend a fair amount of time fishing may want to consider a combination chartplotter-fishfinder. Our last look at plotter-sounders named the Garmin 545s the Practical Sailor Best Choice for combination chartplotter sounders. This review compares the Garmin to the new Raymarine A50D. Testers looked at display unit features, plotter features, and sounder features. The Raymarine unit uses Navionics cartography and can interface with AIS devices.

Preserving a clear view through clear plastic on dodgers or enclosures is one of the most challenging tasks in boat maintenance. Restoring a vinyl window is almost impossible, but that doesn't stop the tide of products that claim to make this job easy. Practical Sailors eisenglass cleaners test looks at 27 products touted primarily as cleaners or treatments for vinyl windows. The test products were divided into type: cleaners, scratch repairers, polish protectants, and UV protectants. After a week of testing, we found Imar Strataglass Protective Cleaner and Imar Strataglass Protective Polish, distributed by Defender Industries, to be the Best Choice. Collinite No. 845 Insulator Wax and Mer-Maids Plexiglass Plastic Cleaner and Polish were the Budget Buys. The test also included products from the following manufacturers: 303, 3M, Aquatech, Armada, Davies, Marykate, Meguiars. Mothers, Novus, Plexus, Sailors Solutions, Star brite, Turtle Wax, West Marine, and Yacht Brite.

You can cut cloth, carpet, and rope with scissors or a knife, but the result is a frayed mess, as soon as the item...

We get a lot of chemistry questions, and a common thread lately seems to be the use of replacement solvents and green alternatives. While...

Letters to Practical Sailor, November 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Standard Horizon, Defender Industries and Weems & Plath

The hatch cover project you reported on in the March 2016 review of the Outland Hatch Covers offered a right nifty approach to making your own covers. Could we see more details on the cover backside and buttons? Also, how did you keep the holesaw from dancing around without the center bit to pilot off of?

Your mention of dissimilar metals and also chlorinated water rang a bell with me. The pressure-relief valves on many water heaters are made of bronze or another metal. One year, on the advice of a friend, I removed my water heaters valve for cleaning and found some of the most foul hydrogen-sulfide odor imaginable, along with some black gooey substance. Its a powerful smell. Since then, Ive been removing, cleaning, and flushing that valve at the start and in the middle of each season; 95 percent of my water odor problems disappeared.

Given the number of Mercedes diesels you see on the highway, its amazingly difficult to find parts for the marinized versions of these engines. Part of the difficulty is the origin of the marine versions of the various Mercedes engines. Mercedes, like several other engine manufacturers, doesn't make marine diesels. They do, however, license other companies to do marine conversions using their engine blocks.