| |
Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Re: Best money you can spend
Posted By: Vic Roy In Response To: Re: auto pilot (bob lico)
Date: Monday, 24 January 2005, at 8:47 p.m.
An autopilot is perhaps the best money you can spend on the boat if you fish offshore, or cruise a long way. My old Hickock 45 had no autopilot, and was a 10 kt. boat. Me & the Bride used to take the kids on a two week vacation every June on her, aptly named the "Rocket", and the trip to and fro was long days and just wore me out. Plus pre-loran even, so you had to really navigate, like plot s**t on charts and make sure the compass was right. And do the time, speed & distance calculations on your wrist watch.
Well, the Rocket went to a new owner (the local coroner, who still has her) and the next UV boat, a Concorde, will remain without comment, as it was perhaps the worst boat ever built.
Then the first Another Joy, a 1972 B25 that I bacame the Steward of in about 76. Going from crap boats to Bertrams is sort of a shock. Nothing breaks, big seas roll under them, etc, ya'll all know the drill. Anyway, we started fishing way offshore in the 25 and I again got tired of steering all the time, even with the new-fangled Loran-C with cross track error dispaly that makes the compass almost obsolete.
So I put an autopilot on the B25 in the early 80's, state of the art stuff, a C-something, plastic box with a compass with a light shining thru it, coupled to a 12v motor that ran a chain drive to the back of the steering box. Dam thing worked pretty good, but required a lot of grease on the chain or it would lock up and strip the gears in the mechanical steering box.
Next was I put Sea Star hyd. steering on the B25, a major improvement, but how to make the chain drive work wtih a hyd. system? Simple with Coonass Engineering. I bought another helm pump and fabricated a bracket out of 1/4 x 2" stainelss bar (yes, I can weld stainless with my reverse polarity DC machine) and coupled the mechanical drive unit to the hyd. helm thru a Lovejoy coupling, and it worked great for years.
Anyway, when I became the Steward of the current AJ, the B31 FBC, some 12 years ago, she had no autopilot, but Sea Star steering. So I investigated pilots, remember this was 12 years ago. I went with a brand new system from Si-Tex, the SP 70, a small head on a coil cord that fits in a plastic bracket on the dash, a pump, a black box, and the fluxgate. Add in a linear rudder feedback hooked to the rudder tie bar. Whole she-bang cost about 1100 back then, and the Sea Trac guys coupled it to my old Raytheon 600 chart plotter. My ratings on electronics is how long they last, not how cool they are now.
The SiTex 70 works perfect to this day, and a lot better since I upgraded to the Capt. Patrick oversize rudders. Had to cut the feedback rate way down on the pilot with the oversized rudders, but that took 5 minutes of button-pushing with the manual in hand. AJ will track to within a degree in any seas on the SP 70. Never hooked the interface up to the new Garmin 2010C plotter, and never turn the old Raytheon 600 on any more, just there as a backup to my backups, but my preference is to hand adjust the pilot to the GPS now and then to keep from going to sleep on the FB.
Just some history of how we got here from there.
UV
UV
| |
Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board is maintained by Patrick McCrary with WebBBS 5.12.