More March Projects

Our dinghy is both taxi and entertainment. To extend its life, MJ is making shade for the tubes, fashioning the pattern out of an old sheet, then sewing up with Sunbrella.  Advice from Jocelyn at Quantum Sails was to be sure to make the chaps roomy enough to account for shrinkage.  More advice from Jane on Shea La Vie was to design a tiedown in the bow to keep the chaps from flapping up in the front.  When hemmed, a line will run down to the painter D-ring, maybe through a grommet.  Another bit of advice from Jane caused a redesign of attachment points from Velcro to grommets. Jane's experience was that after a couple of year's worth of sand and salt, Velcro is useless.

A couple of years ago we found a beautiful teak and holly table at H and L Marine Woodwork. MJ weatherproofed it with a bunch of coats of Honey Teak (which she'd never do again because it turned the holly yellow). The problem was figuring out a good way to mount the table in the cockpit. SolMate's wheel and pedestal sit in the forward third of the cockpit. Mounting a table in a convenient location was a puzzle.

After a couple of years of staring at the wheel, at the cockpit and the binnacle, Stan finally came up with this innovation. By removing the wheel and clamping big blocks of teak to the binnacle bars in front, the table is offset enough to mount behind the binnacle, where there's more room to eat and lounge. Seating for four!

For safety's sake, we can drop the table down and remount the wheel in just a few seconds. Lowering the table without a big hassle makes it easy to remount the wheel when we go to sleep at night, just in case we need to move quickly in the middle of the night.

Baja cruisers rave about their dinghy wheels, how the wheels keep the bottom of the dinghy from wearing out and make beach landings easier. Our dinghy bottom is fiberglass, and beach landings could definitely gouge out chunks.

We snagged a pair of wheels at Downwind Marine in San Diego last summer. Mounting them on the dinghy finally floated up to the top of the "to-do" list this Spring. Designing the mounting hardware was another brilliant engineering feat.

The lip sticking out at the top prevented mounting the wheels directly to the transom. The wheel mount required a stand-off of some sort so the wheels could be locked in the upright, cruising, position. Stan engineered the mounting brackets using a 3" square aluminum tube from McMaster-Carr.

If they're clever, dinghy drivers will train themselves to lift the engine's tiller arm when making right turns. It just hits the left-hand wheel a little bit, but the tiller can be lifted up over the wheel for a tight right-hand turn. That's if the driver is paying attention....