Pearson 365 and 367

The prop spins to right while backing. The bottom of the prop is slipping water to port. The top is trying to slip water to starboard, but most of the flow is diverted (by the hull) upward. this creates a net force to starboard. The shaft is offset to starboard so that when spinning to the left when in forward, the net force to port is somewhat cancelled by the vectored force.

I have a 365 that a previous owner made into a sloop. I installed the Tides system when I first purchased her in 2009.
I replaced the sheaves with Delrin ones, and the sails can be raised almost silently, and with without the winch until the end. I highly recommend the system.

Paragon makes several reduction ratios. For the W40 you want the 2:1. It's also possible it's slipping, and will need to be adjusted.

The preheat is in the intake manifold. There should be a button near the start button.
In general, if the W40 doesn't start, it's a fuel issue. The worst place for air in the fuel, (and the hardest to bleed) is in the high pressure lines from the injector pump to the injectors. If air gets in, it will compress preventing the pressure to get high enough to trip the injector. Simply cracking the nut at the injectors, and cranking a bit will clear it. (don't forget to re-tighten them, or you'll have a mess).
I've heard some say you can use ether to help start in cold weather, but I've seen how rings get destroyed by the premature ignition that causes.
If the weather gets too cold, you might try a block heater.

You can also disconnect the raw water exhaust at the exhaust elbow, and let it run into the bilge. Then using a 12V water pump ($35 from Harbor Freight) to push 50/50 antifreeze through the system. You'll have to add a little to the hydro-lift muffler to keep it from freezing. The antifreeze in the bilge keeps any water that collects there from freezing and can be pumped out in the spring.

Here's a link to the pump I mentioned:
http://www.harborfreight.com/12-volt-marine-utility-pump-9576.html

Every time I look at the Walker Bay, I think about how limited it is. The Portland punt is a better execution of the idea, but much more expensive. Ah to be richer ... (younger too).

Your charge controller is trying to protect your batteries. Batteries have internal resistance that causes them to heat as they charge. The resistance and the internal leakage goes up as they age, and the aging is caused by the heat. When you approach a full charge condition, the battery will accept less current without heating. This link might help:
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_heat_and_harsh_loading_reduces_battery_life

Thank Dale (i.e. Maruska).
He put it together back when he had time to do these things. It sure came in handy for me.

Unfortunately I live near Boston, so everything is outrageous. I paid $620.00 to have it built to my specs. I've heard others say they had it done for $400.00, but that was in Texas. Be careful with the fittings. I tried anti-seize materials, but the brass to aluminum junction at the tank kept leaking air. I switched to a Nylon fitting there, and it stopped leaking. I had to ground the fuel solenoid so the rest of the fuel system wouldn't need to rely on the engine ground, but it's working well now.   

I had to remove the engine and have it rebuilt. While it was out, I pumped the tank into a 55 gal drum, detached the connections and it came out over the plywood box without too much swearing.

I had a new tank built to the dimensions Dale gave me in a .dxf file, and it was an exact replica.
I had it built out of 0.125" 5052 marine grade aluminum, then painted it with zinc chromate primer and an epoxy two part over that.
I then replaced the plywood under the tank with acetal and machined some acetal standoffs for the staps I'm holding it down with (stainless).

I tried posting the .dxf, but this site doesn't like attachments so here's the link to the photos including a screen shot of the .dxf

http://s1261.photobucket.com/user/barrylab1/library/Relentless/Fuel%20Tank%20R%20R/Tank%20Install?sort=3&page=1

That's what I thought until I took the tank out. Had a previous owner painted the tank I would have been even more convinced I was OK.
If you look at this picture:
http://s1261.photobucket.com/user/barrylab1/media/Relentless/Fuel%20Tank%20R%20R/Tank%20Removal/IMG_0070.jpg.html?sort=3&o=3
you can see the corners had rust much worse than the others. The tank sat on plywood which held moisture, and accelerated the rusting process. I decided to replace it with an Aluminum replica, and when I brought the old tank to the fabricator, it began to leak the few ounces of diesel left in the tank. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

I had the same problem a few years back, and found the skeg full of water. Curious, I took the skeg foot apart. Here are the pictures:
http://s1261.photobucket.com/user/barrylab1/library/Rudder%20Skeg%20Work?sort=3&page=1

The alternator has a black 00 wire to the ground terminals of the battery, a red 00 wire to the battery isolator, and a ground 10 gauge wire to the voltage regulator. The starter has a black 0 gauge wire to the ground terminals, and a red 0 gauge wire to the battery switch.The grounds to the instruments come through the wire harness. There is an 8 gauge green wire and an 8 gauge red wire that bring ground and 12V to the instrument cluster (lights mostly). The lights work fine, The alternator charges the battery, but the ground path to the tachometer seems to have an issue. I don't get much DC drop, but the tach won't work without the additional 16 guage "signal ground" I've run from the negative battery terminals to the tachometer ground pin. I suspect corrosion wherever the green wire is connected to the engine, though I haven't traced that back yet. I just assume that if I got less than an ohm with my meter and there was just a couple of millivolts of drop when measuring DC, that the wire was OK. Somehow ground must have shifted, or the inductance of the harness caused a drop. Somehow when I measured the AC signal with the same handheld meter, I got 7.6V, from the tach ground to the tach "S" terminal, so it still doesn't make sense.

All the wiring except the engine harness are new this year, and now the engine harness is due for an upgrade.

After calling everyone from Perkins (whose part number Westerbeke uses) to Westerbeke (who branded the tachometer) to Datcon (manufacturer of the tachometer) to  TOAD marine (who sold me the tachometer), I called the Westerbeke local distributor: Hanson Marine and spoke with Bob Hanson. He made a few calls and told me that Balmer (the alternator manufacturer) suggested the ground connection was probably bad. I'd just ohmed out the connections and had <1 Ohm in the ground path, so I thought this was another wrong guess. Just to be sure I wired a new connection to ground - The tachometer just started working. Seems the old connection is intermittent, probably in the wire as this wiring is almost 40 years old and isn't tinned.

Hats off to Bob Hanson of Hanson Marine. He was the only person to come up with a potential solution.

When my trusty Westerbeke water pump died and pumped coolant into the engine, I decided to have it rebuilt. That was two years ago, and I just hit the water again. Part of the delay was caused by my engineer mentality that suggests you do things in a logical order and they are much easier to do. I replaced the fuel tank while the engine was out (good thing too, the old one started to leak on the fabricator's floor). I also decided to get a new tachometer. The old one had an hour meter that was blank, it didn;t show anything because all the numbers had long since faded away.

Here's the saga of the new tachometer:
I bought one from TAD marine at the ransom price of over $300.00. I justified it by saying it was a Westerbeke, so I was maintaining some historical integrity. While the engine was getting it's rebuild, the tach somehow disappeared into the mass of stored items taken off during the removal. When it cam time to put the engine in, I wanted a tach, so, like a fool I bought a second one. I thought, well, now I have a spare ...
When I put the new tachometer into the instrument panel, I redid all the wiring from the engine to the panel, as a previous owner had replaced it with house wire of many types bolted together in places and wrapped with enough electrical tape to make a black mummy.

When I started the engine, the tach moved from the 0 position, counterclockwise to the 4000RPM line. I read the literature that came with the tach and realized you need to adjust a knob that has settings of 4,6,8,A & B
The literature doesn't say which to set it to, it says to use it as a coarse control and use the internal potentiometer (with a 2mm allen wrench) to fine tune it. (i don't care what you say you don't read the directions until it doesn't work). None of the settings caused any different behavior.

I found the "spare tach finally and tried it with identical results, so I brought one to work, where I could play with it in a controlled lab environment. I found that you need to remove power to reset the reverse slammed condition, then no signal to the tach input pin (S) results in 0RPM. With the coarse setting at 4, a 2KHz square wave produces about 500RPM, a coarse setting of 8 creates 1000RPM when 20KHz is put in. In both cases the needle moves up and down with the fine adjust and adjusting the frequency. A setting of 6 has similar behavior, so I thought they might be right about the coarse/fine definition.

Settings A & B did nothing no matter what I did with amplitude, frequency, duty cycle or fine tune settings.

Discouraged by this I did more research. I turns out the tach is made by Datcon. It is a PN 71725-00 Model 124A40EM. This is apparently a marine industrial version of a truck model they manufacture. It's available for about $125.00 from several places. They actually have a pretty good manual that explains 4 is for a 4 cylinder ignition signal, 6 is for 6 cylinder, 8 is for 8 cylinder, A is for a 10 pole alternator signal and B is for a 12 pole alternator signal. My Balmar is a 12 pole so that should work. I also found a rnat by someone saying they bought a smaller Datcon tach and had to put a capacitor in series with the tach to get it to work.
Guess what I'm trying tomorrow.

I tried sending this with a picture, but the site seems to not accept posts with pictures right now.
The short answer is 1 1/8 shaft X 2 1/4 Shaft Log.
Basically this guy:
http://www.pyiinc.com/?section=browse&action=product-detail&sku=02118214
I'm finishing the install today.

Thanks for the kind words Pete, I wasn't sure if I came off as arrogant. When I don't know who I'm explaining something to, I have trouble with how deep to dive to explain something. Being an engineer by training and profession I have a sometimes violent reaction to marketing/sales belief systems that seem unsupported by physics, and need to scale it back a little. My friends know this button, and love to push it.

As for the lithium based batteries, they do have some very impressive characteristics, but still scare me some. I have a friend who is a dive instructor using them in a dive light. A few years ago he had a leak, and molten lithium (still burning) exited the bottom of his dive light at 70 feet. Hydrogen gas from Lead-Acid is dangerous, but molten lithium knows no bounds, and would go right through fiberglass. The charging circuits are pretty cool with all the safety features (current control & temp sensors) though, and some lithium technologies are 3 Volt cells instead of 1.4-1.6 like most other battery technologies. Fewer cells means less complexity and lower series resistance. I'm very risk averse (again the engineer thing), but I can see how they might have a future in the marine industry. (My friend still uses them in his new dive light!)
If you change the electrolyte, you have a super capacitor. Not a s much storage, 2.5V cells, but much safer aand still very low series resistance.