OK, we missed a weekend

Saturday morning at 7 AM was cold. Not just ordinary New England-in-winter cold but a frosty 5 degrees on my back porch. I dressed as warmly as possible and then began to think about what it would be like on the boat in that metal shed. At about 9 AM, when it didn't get much warmer, I gave up and decided to stay home and work on another, although relatively minor, boat project.

This boat has Judson Sync indicator on it, although it apparently doesn't work. We installed a similar Judson Sync Indicator that we bought on Ebay on our last boat and we loved it because it made it easy to adjust the two engines so that they were running at exactly the same speed, thus saving some fuel and minimizing vibration. The sync indicator is a neon bulb mounted in a torpedo shaped housing.  You can see the one we have at the extreme left in this photo with its dead round eye looking out. It's next to the Eagle Fishfinder, another piece of legacy electronics that will eventually have to go.

They don't make these things any more and the alternative today is a sync gauge. I searched around for a nice small one that I could mount in the gauge cluster, but no luck. The only one I could find was a Faria sync gauge that was 4-inches around, and that's a big gauge, too big to mount in the existing instrument cluster.

 

Since that was our only available gauge, I bought one and then had to try to figure out how to mount it. I located a spot at the upper helm that had many holes drilled in it from past electronics that were now gone and decided that I could build a small enclosure that would hold the sync gauge and a depth gauge.  Here's the mounting point that I think will work. It's on the starboard side of the compass.

I had been thinking about this and took some measurements so, instead of going to the boat and freezing my butt off, I spent the afternoon of January 30 building a nice little "box" for the gauges that will mount on that spot, making the gauges easily visible without blocking my forward vision. It's been fiberglassed and is curing now.

Here's a picture of it after rough fiberglassing with the gauges in place for a test fit. In the picture, I've propped it up at the approximate angle that it will mount in that space at the top of the bridge console.

 

I made this enclosure wide enough to also hold an inexpensive Uniden Depth Gauge. We have a 1990s era "Fishfinder" that works but I prefer just seeing the depth so maybe sometime soon, we'll install a transducer for the Uniden. I'd just as soon remove the old Fishfinder but we may not have time to that this winter.

Just so you understand that Frances and I aren't complete winter outcasts, we went to the Hartford Boat show on Sunday with our friends and dock-mates Carol Anne and Rob. The show was OK. The conversation was, as always, fun, stimulating and full of spice. CA and Rob will know what I mean by "spice.".