Your most "interesting" engineering feats

[Larks]

'Thought this might bring out some interesting stories of what to do and what not to do in certain situations.......

What engineering masterpieces have you concocted to get out of trouble and did they work????

I found these pics when looking for some Summer sailing pic's for Martha B's thread:

I was delivering an older racing yacht "Australian Maid" from Darwin to Port Klang, Malaysia, a few weeks after the Bali bombing and had picked up some interesting crew for the trip including a couple of German engineering graduates (I never found out what field of engineering).

The time of year was synonymous with there being no breeze to be expected so we were well loaded with fuel and expecting to motor at least all of the way from Darwin to Bali and this proved to be the case.

Because of the age of the boat, the heat and continuous motoring I had been specific with the crew in doing engine checks with each plot on the hour so I was quite surprised when I awoke after a 3 hour snooze to find the temp up and amps right down. On inspection I found that we had lost a fan belt and with the on watch crew having quite a few cabin lights blazing and all of us sleeping with fans on to try and get some sleep we were using a fare amount of power.

I had no choice but to shut down the engine to replace the fan belt but as a result we had absolutely no charge left in our batteries to restart the engine. As we were closer to Bali than Darwin I was reasonably comfortable that we'd get some sort of breeze sooner or later to be able to get some sails up so wasn't particularly concerned however at the time we were in a milpond with not a puff of air to be felt.

After swims, food, more swims, music, more food, reading etc for a few hours one of our German engineers came up with the idea of trying to get some charge into the batteries by spinning the alternator with the outboard engine. None of us were clued up enough on electrics to know whether we could get it to charge this way or how to "excite" it to charge but there was nothing to loose by trying and it passed the time for the crew giving it a go.

Anyway here are the pic's setting up with a system of blocks and lines to the alternator from the outboard prop shaft along with exhaust system etc..............

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii11/Larks_01/AustMaidDelivery007.jpg

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii11/Larks_01/AustMaidDelivery011.jpg

Anyway, as much fun as it was it didn't work...........in the end I remembered a story about someone using the boom to pull start their engine. We didn't do exactly that but I turned a line around the drive pulley and gave it a massive pull (very carefully so as to not get fingers, hands etc caught in a line that might get caught in the fan belt - a 125hp engine so I was nervous of the compression) while I had someone turn the ignition key.

The combination of what little battery charge there was and this "pull start" did start the engine.........but the outboard engine experiment was more interesting to show the photos of.

Anyway, what stories do you have???

[Larks]

Bye the way, the set up with the outboard did actually operate quite well and turned the alternator as it should but we just couldn't "excite" the alternator to charge the batteries.

[John Bertenshaw]

What a great idea! Just not enough revs to make it work ?
When I had a petrol engine in Waione ( back in the '80's) I used to crank start it with a socket set ratchet and socket on the crank pulley.
That was exciting.:D

[Willin']

That's some major Goldbergian stuff going on there Larks! A work to be proud of. Our humble effort pales in comparison.

The mission was to erect a 19ft. tall bow shed using 2 men, a dog, a short ladder and a picnic table.

The ridge beam was screwed securely to a few half arches and laid out so as to be tilted up using blocks and tackle to some nearby pines.

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Boatshedlores005.jpg

The opposite half arches were attached loosely using strips of carpet for hinges. The temp. was in the mid teens and everything was pretty brittle. A slight breeze could have brought the whole thing down in a twisted mess as we hauled together.
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Boatshedlores001.jpg

Once it was up we took a few minutes to admire our work. Damn...we good!

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Mickey002.jpg

Next we raised the remaining arches. Even on the picnic table, the ladder was too low to reach the ridge beam, so we improvised.

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Mickey006.jpg

The river had started icing so we were forced to haul and put the boat away a little earlier than we'd hoped.

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Mickey021.jpg

The one piece tarp was hauled up and over the completed frame using the same 2 blocks and tackle.



http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l100/Hotrudderedbum/Drift/Mickey023-1.jpg

[ron ll]

You mean, "What would Archimedes do?" :D

I don't have any as clever as above but I once (when I was much younger) shinnied up the mast to retrieve a halyard on a small keelboat. Later after doing a little math knowing the weight of the keel and the length of the mast I realized it was something Archimedes would definitely NOT do. :)

[Dan McCosh]

My favorite remains an achievement by a German (of course) engineer in a club I used to belong to. He had constructed the strongest cradle for storage, adequate for the Cutty Sark, as well as a gin pole capable of erecting the same ship's masts. I was getting a pump out at a nearby marina. I was down below watching the holding tank, when the guy on deck started the pump. To my horror, in a few seconds, the holding tank collapsed as if a giant hand had crushed it.
As it turned out, Hans had built the pumpout. He had connected a large vacuum tank that was energized by a vacuum pump that was connected in turn to the tank on shore. The dock hand had connected the thing to my tank, then slammed the valve wide open, and atmospheric pressure took its course.

[Larks]

Willie, can you tell me more about the H28 in the pics or do you have other posts here that you can direct me to?

[willmarsh3]

I like the outboard trick. :)

After a raftup someone discovered their diesel would not start because the battery was too low. This engine had compression levers so we raised them. Then we could use the starter to spin the flywheel. Then we slammed one compression lever down and she came to life. This is a very good trick to know.

[StevenBauer]

Willie, can you tell me more about the H28 in the pics or do you have other posts here that you can direct me to?

Hey Larks, there's a thread about Willin's International 500 Here: http://www.woodenboat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70722


Steven

[Larks]

Thanks Steven, I thought I was being a bit smart in picking her as a H28, too bloody smart eh.....she is a lovely yacht and I'm also pretty sweet on "Talisman", what a honey!!

[oldsub86]

Not my story but my brother in law related had good one. He and a friend used to go on an annual fishing trip up north. On the way back one year, the alternator in the truck started to give out. They were a long way from home and from any sort of parts store and it was getting dark so they needed the lights to work as well as to keep the motor running. They had a small generator with as well as a battery charger that they used for the electric trolling motor battery. So they put the generator in the boat and ran the power cord up the boat trailer and over the cab into the underhood area - plugged the battery charger in and connected it to the battery and drove on home for the last 2 or 3 hundred miles through the night.

Randy

[Bruce Hooke]

One of the more satisfying ones was when I was driving in a fairly remote area with a couple of cousins. Suddenly the car came to stop in the middle of nowhere. We got out and one of my cousins heard a noise of liquid dribbling out of something. He looked down under the car and saw that the fuel line was busted and gas was pouring out onto the ground. Not good. He quickly stopped the leak with his finger while we contemplated what to do next. Let's just say one of the hoses under the hood was a little bit longer than it really needed to be and a couple of hose clamps under the hood were not really necessary where they were... :D

Another project I was just the assistant on was helping my father build a septic system. The problem was that the drain field was down a hill that it would be very hard to get a truck down and we needed to get quite a few dump truck loads of fill down there. We rigged up an aerial cableway with two fixed cables and two cars and a big bin at the top that the fill would get dumped into and a chute to direct fill into the cable cars. The heavy car full of fill going down pulled the empty car back up. The control cable that connected the two cars took a few turns around an old wheel rim on the end of an old axle, and a lever hooked up to the brake cable provided breaking power. The biggest problem was that the hill was convex not concave so the fixed cable had to go over an intermediate support halfway down the hill. If the cars were not going just the right speed when they went over this they either got stuck or derailed with half a yard of fill inside. Most of the town knew about this rig and and fair percentage probably stopped by at one time or another to have a look.

We got involved in some good ones as kids too...like using a home-made block and tackle to haul a water soak 12' 8"x8"s up a 5' high embankment. There was also a time when we had a raft that we had made of such timbers that ended up half buried in sand above the usual high tide line. Using a couple of old car jacks, various skids and levers and muscle power we managed to lift the raft up and slide it down the beach into the water.

[paladin]

Late 70's Alaska, white out.....feller flew a plane right down to the ground and into a snow drift....he was rescued a few days later...plane was lost.....in the fall snow had drifted away enough that the top of the tail and the tail feathers were exposed as I was flying over....went down to look, battery was dead but engine would turn....weather looked like it would hold for 2-3 days....got on the HF radio, called anchorage to office....got a couple dozen large truck innertubes, borrowed a set of skis from a 206, brought out 2 herman nelson heaters.....packed the innertubes under the wings and fuselage, filled them from a scuba tankwrappped blankets around the engines and piped in heat with the herman nelsons, jacked the plane up high enough to allow the landing gear to drop, removed the wheels, installed the skis, got the engines started and let run for half an hour...loaded up all the gear in the other planes and flew them out. First time anyone had seen a Cessna 401 on skis.....netted about 350K for the salvage job. Plane had been written off by the insurance company.....all for a full days work. Salvaged another aircraft in a similar manner on Kodiak Island a few months later.....

[Larks]

Great story Paladin, what were you flying? I once had a loan of a book on the history of the DeHaviland Beaver with most of the stories based up in your old stomping ground and some in the highlands of New Zealand. The guys that were flying those things around a few years back were some "innovative" dudes !!! There are still quite a few flying commercially over here and they are great planes but I think the pilots are a little tamer these days.

[Stiletto]

I once built a tankstand about 6m tall for a gravity feed water system and managed to get a 450 gallon corrugated tank on top of it by myself.

I fastened each end of a rope to the two front corners of the platform, hung it down and under the corrugated side of the tank; grasped the centre of the rope and pulled, rolling it up toward myself. Doing it this way gave me a 2:1 purchase and the rope slid smoothly in the corrugations as it came up. A bit of manhandling at the top and it was sitting nicely in place.

[John Bertenshaw]

Hardly engineering, but my most recent McIver was fixing the throttle cable that broke while we were halfway into our Christmas cruise up North.
The problem was that the cable broke about 18 in in at the engine end but also I found that the casing had worn and broken about 2 ft in from the other end.
So I reversed and shortened the casing by splicing/ sleeving it with 2 turns of duct tape, a short bit of stainless pipe I found and some plastic tube over that plus a couple of hose clips.
http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/cruise%2008/246_4645_1.jpg

Then, at the throttle end I just had bare cable( stainless wire, Morse teleflex 33c) with no terminal end obviously. I was going to bend it but came up with the idea to use some electrical strip connecters to lock it off.
http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/cruise%2008/246_4646_1.jpg
worked fine , still does.:rolleyes:

[Paul Fitzgerald]

Great story Paladin, what were you flying? I once had a loan of a book on the history of the DeHaviland Beaver with most of the stories based up in your old stomping ground and some in the highlands of New Zealand. The guys that were flying those things around a few years back were some "innovative" dudes !!! There are still quite a few flying commercially over here and they are great planes but I think the pilots are a little tamer these days.

The Flying Doctor Service used Beavers in the '70's. Neat planes.
Whenever a new doctor turned up the pilots took bets on how many G's they could take, then tested them out.
It wasn't much fun for the doctors, but those planes could really move around the sky.

They used to teach us how to fly and land them too, just in case something went wrong ......

[The Bigfella]

I had a DeHavilland Beaver taxi past Grantala last weekend. There is a "water-only" access restaurant just near where I moor and people often come up from Sydney Harbour by seaplane for lunch.

I might have a photo or two around (somewhere)

http://www.seaplanes.com.au/

[Hwyl]

worked fine , still does.

You do realise that you should fix it properly.

[paladin]

My plane was a Cessna 195 with the 220 hp Jacobs engine replaced with a 330 hp continental.......the Beaver was a wee bit outta my price range, but a turbine powered Beaver would have been nice. I flew a conventional Beaver in Thailand/Lao/Cambodia/Vietnam when my plane went in for overhaul....

[Tim_H]

The combination of what little battery charge there was and this "pull start" did start the engine.........but the outboard engine experiment was more interesting to show the photos of.

Anyway, what stories do you have???

You could have just put the outboard on the back of the boat also. Better than nothing.

[Hwyl]

Unfortunately, a lot of these are just normal operating procedure for me.

On a recent deliver with Rbgarr and Elf, I washed out a clogged diesel filter with stove alcohol.

I used to run a boat, that the only way i could get the engine to bleed, was to attach the dinghy inflation pump to the tank vent and pump like crazy, inflate the steel fuel tank and wait for fuel to start gushing out of the fuel tank,on the same boat, the little bit of battery and string round the flywheel method saved my bacon a few time

[John Bertenshaw]

You do realise that you should fix it properly.
of course, the reason I'm procrastinating is the hard spot that caused the casing break back by the lever( over 20 years I guess). I want to re route it so I need to strip quite a bit more to get an accurate measurement. At that time I'll replace it and the gear select cable even though that looks fine.

[PatrickXavier]

You do realise that you should fix it properly.
JohnB, you may have to explain "Number 8 fencing wire".

[John Bertenshaw]

:D Oh I'm sure Gareth understands that ,Patrick. Might have another name for it ,with lots of FF's and YYs close together,thats all.

[John Bertenshaw]

Here's one harking back to 1990.
a bit of a drama at the time.. no engine and 50 miles from home.
http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/scan0004_1.jpg

http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/scan0002_1.jpg

http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/scan0005_1.jpg

http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/mast.jpg


http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/scan0006_1.jpg

[Paul Pless]

So that's what she looked like with her Bermudan rig.;)

http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd48/Waione_photos/Misc%20compressed%20ex%20imagest/scan0006_1.jpg

[Hwyl]

You do realise that you should fix it properly.

The Brit' in me would have left it alone. I have friends who start their boats by twisting wire together.

Took me a few years to going from "The field fix works well, so why trouble trouble when trouble don't trouble you" to "field fix, then proper job".


Note italicized statement is the West Indian version of "if it ain't broke...."

[J. Dillon]

John , Looks good I like stories like this . :D Most would yell for a tow but self reliance is the best solution. It reminds me of the story of how the skipper of the Cutty Sark shipped a new rudder at sea after the original was destroyed in a storm.:eek:

JD

[Peter Eikenberry]

My father was an engineer at Boeing. We had a summer cabin on Hood Canal and about 48 acres of trees. He was always making some sort of Rube Goldberg contraptions to do something. All of them worked so at the time I didn't think they were strange.

I have had to do that on occasion but the one that seemed to stick with me was in 1972. I was out of work, and had very little money and was living in Port Townsend on my VA education benefit and odd jobs. My wife's grandmother died. They were very close. But we would have to go to New York, and it was January. The only way we could afford it was to drive cross country. Well we did ok, it took 4 days. But in the middle of Nebraska on I-80, in the middle of the night, every thing on the car stopped working. Lights went dead , engine shut down and there we were with a child (my son was about 3 1/2) and stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Plus that even if we had been near a town it was Sunday and everything in those little towns shuts down on Sundays.

Well after checking this, that, and everything I figured out that the generator just wasn't putting out. (how I made that conclusion, I simply don't remember) but I took it off. Sure enough the brushes were worn down to nothing. Well after much head scratching and swearing, I took the D cell batteries out of my only working flashlight. I took the batteries apart, extracted the carbon core, carved it into pretty much a square rod, and cut it into two pieces about the right length. I stuck them both in the generator, put the thing back together, remounted it on the engine. Pushed the car to get it running and Damn! it worked. It got us to NY where my father-in-law, who was once an auto-mechanic got the right part and fixed it.

Today, with alternators on auto engines you couldn't do that.

[py]

Quite a few years back I was running my girlfriend home in my Mini after a rather pleasant evening at my place. I was only in my pyjamas. Middle of the night. Ran out of petrol on the way back to my house which is up in the hills. I recalled the fuel hose comes out at the front of the tank on a mini. So I rolled down the hill a way, spun the car round. Sure enough she started up after a bit of cranking and I drove the rest of the way home backwards.

[Larks]

I took the batteries apart, extracted the carbon core, carved it into pretty much a square rod, and cut it into two pieces about the right length. I stuck them both in the generator, put the thing back together, remounted it on the engine. Pushed the car to get it running and Damn! it worked. It got us to NY where my father-in-law, who was once an auto-mechanic got the right part and fixed it.

Today, with alternators on auto engines you couldn't do that.[/quote]

That is brilliant!

[Peter Eikenberry]

Thanks Larks. All I was really interested in was not having me and my wife and son freezing to death out in the middle of nowhere. I looked at was left of the brushes and they looked to me just like a battery core. I'm just glad it worked.

John, that is a beautiful sailboat!

[PeterSibley]

A friend and I came up with a cheap and cheerful starter motor for his ancient 20hp Yanmar .It's a hand start and starts easily but it helps if you're a gorilla ! His wife objected , long and loud but the problem was that there was no room to fit a standard starter .

Enter a $30 starter and reduction from a 500 twin Yamaha bike .Small enough ...all you do is open the decompressor ,wind her up to speed and close the lever .Effortless and cheeeeep.Doesn't need much battery either .

[carioca1232001]

.......Today, with alternators on auto engines you couldn't do that.

Of course you could and the requirement for the make-do device is a lot less exacting:

1. The brushes need conduct no more than 100-200 milliamps, as all they do is establish a connection to the (rotating-field) rotor; there is no load current through an alternator´s rotor brushes .

2. The circumferential dimension of the brush is hardly critical, in contrast with a DC generator where the brushes operate primarily as mechanical rectifiers in order to maintain uni-directional (DC) current flow in the load circuit.

But like Larks, you deserve 11 on 10 for your resourcefulness !

[carioca1232001]

....After swims, food, more swims, music, more food, reading etc for a few hours one of our German engineers came up with the idea of trying to get some charge into the batteries by spinning the alternator with the outboard engine. None of us were clued up enough on electrics to know whether we could get it to charge this way or how to "excite" it to charge but there was nothing to loose by trying and it passed the time for the crew giving it a go.

Had you diconnected the 'ignition light' wire from the ignition switch (to the alternator´s voltage regulator) and re-made this connection directly to the half-dead battery, the make-do battery charger setup would have worked perfectly.

Most alternators need just a tiny bit of energy to get going, that is, an initial supply of field-current, but once on the go, the alternator´s output supplies current to the rotating-field, thus the term 'self-exciting'.

So, in principle, you could actually disconnect the battery - from where the initial field current was made available - and the alternator would continue to supply load current, uninterrupted.

But on disconnecting the battery with the alternator in full-swing - the battery acts as an electrical fly-wheel - you could well have a voltage peak on the output before the voltage regulator sorted out the situation .............. and blow a lot of sensitive electronic devices, so don´t try this out !

[Dave Hadfield]

Two years ago on Drake we were heading out at long last. I'd re-built the cabin roof and we were desperate for a cruise. As we motored away from the harbour I noticed the engine temperature gauge was working. "That's odd," I thought, "It never works." In a few minutes I put 2 + 2 together and realized the reason it was indicating was because the engine was overheating (23 hp Farymann).

When I had a look I discovered the water pump had come apart. It's an external Jabsco pump, belt-driven. The pulley and shaft had wormed its way right out the front of the pump. They were lying in the bilge.

It was a Saturday afternoon of course, so the time remaining to sail back, wait until Monday, order the part, wait for delivery and install it would completely spoil the cruise. Rats.

I fiddled around with it, re-assembled it, put it all back in place and started the engine. It worked! The seal was shot so it leaked a little water, but it worked fine. Plenty of water came out the exhaust pipe.

But in a minute or two the shaft started to work its way forward out of the pump again. It was only a question if time before it came apart once more. What to do?

Well, it's a wooden boat! With wooden shaft logs to support the engine. So what I came up with was a wooden post. I took a spare piece of 2x4 (I always stash a few pieces of this-and-that lumber and plywood in odd corners) and carved it to a shape that screwed onto the bedlog under the pump, and then rose up and was positioned right in front of the pulley. It formed a physical stop. I started the engine, the pulley began emerging from the pump again, it was stopped by the new wooden post, and the pump continued to work just fine!

I was concerned that the friction of the pulley would burn the wood, but the leaky seal sprayed just enough water to keep the whole thing wet and lubricated. Serendipitous.

It worked fine. I inspected it often, but the upshot was we went cruising. I didn't fix it until nearly haul-out time that fall.

[UCanoe_2]

I once had a '79 Nissan pickup truck with a 2 piece driveshaft. Just forward of the center U-joint, the shaft was supported by a bearing in a rubber mount. The rubber rotted away, but the bearing was still in good shape. Replacing the rubber mount properly would have involved dropping the entire driveshaft, disconnecting the halves, and pressing off the bearing. It was an old truck and I had no money. I got a tube of silicone caulk and squirted it into the space where the rubber used to be. I used a couple pieces of cardboard to hold the caulk in place while it dried. 24 hours later it was as good as new. Later I sold the truck to some friends who used it to move from Virginia to Texas and back. This repair held up for 5 or 6 years until the truck was so rusty it was consigned to the junk yard.

[The Bigfella]

The old broken accelerator cable in the VW Beetle - but that was an easy fix - just undo the choke cable and relocate it - bingo, hand throttle.

[soba]

UCanoe_2,

I've done something like that. We had an old toyota tercel given to us for free, and one day the motor simply pulled loose, and every time we let the clutch out the motor and front wheels jumped up and down like a rabbit in a milk carton.

Being as we live out in the middle of the boonies and I couldn't DRIVE in to get new motor mounts, I unbolted the lot of them (supporting the motor with a few blocks of wood) and cleaned them up on the wire wheel. It was pretty easy to see how they were MEANT to go together, and I used the paslode to hold them in suspension on a couple of pieces of wood. There is a Bulldog brand urethane seal meant for roofs that has a lot of gritty bits in it, and when it is cured the durometer seems the same as hard motor mount rubber. I got a bucket of water and poured in some dish soap. Then I caulked two entire tubes of roof sealer into the bucket, and moulded the caulk into a big ball. I used it to pack the motor mount brackets SOLID, with a large helping of goo outside all around the bracket, too! You can mold the goo around with your bare hands with a bit of dish soap and water...

Turns out I used too much, and when I went to re-install the cured mounts, I had to carve a bunch away to get them into place.

120 000 km later they are still there, work great, and the motor no longer jumps. Found out from Toyota that each motor mount (there are 3) is $166, so I am more than happy with my $22 fix!

[Larks]

Who says ingenuity is dead?!!! These are brilliant...!!

You've reminded me of a great TV series from a few years back here in Oz called "Bush Mechanics" which was a very low budget but brilliantly done series on a group of young Aboriginal guys who had the most brilliant "fixes" for their veeeery dodgy cars. Eg: flat battery? Light a fire, cook something to eat on it along with the battery, when you've finished eating stick the heated battery back in your car and off you go.

Here's a link to their website for anyone who's interested: http://www.bushmechanics.com/ I lived in Alice Springs for 17 years so I've seen how these guys keep their vehicles running and they are brilliant (From these guys I learnt to use a piece of Mulga wood Cobb and Co'd on with fencing wire to fix a broken steering tie rod on a mates Range Rover and it did the job for about 3 years until he sold it and they remembered it during the trade in inspection.)

[Little Billy]

We were in the boonies headed out for a weekend of dirt biking when my buddies' 59 Ford ranchero died in the road. It was a fuel delivery problem so the next day when it got light we found the fuel pump had lots of wear on the bronze block that rides the cam. We took a beer bottle cap and hammered it flat, held it with pliers and scraped it on the asphalt to make two flats on the circumference, laid it on the bronze block and bent the remaining edges around the arm to retain it. The car ran great.

It was still early Saturday so we asked ourselves- do we go back to town or keep going out for some of the the best hill climbing in the U.S. west. The choice was clear- we drove 50 more miles, rode all weekend and then drove 300 miles home. He used the car for work all the next week before he bothered to buy a new fuel pump!