Kaimusailing

The USB/serial adapters arrived in the mail from Pennsylvania. They were cheap. I was advised not to get the cheap ones, they don’t work. When I opened the little package there was also a tiny CD disk with the drivers on it. After installing the drivers, using Windows automatic search on the CD drive, the serial cable from the old GPS now connected. I was able to load local maps into the GPS, although the previously installed maps were overwritten. If I end up in Stockton, California, I will miss them. The firmware update, which is downloaded from Garmin, self extracts from a compressed file, and looks for the device on Comm 1, 2, 3, or 4. It didn’t help that the new USB/serial converter showed up in Device Manager as Comm 29.
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The problem is that the older computers never had so many virtual comm ports, so the software could be written to only look for comm 1-4, since they were hard wired actual ports on the computer frame. The work around to eliminate the excess comm ports was found on the internet and I won’t offer it here, it’s easily found by googling “renumbering comm ports”. Now, when the new serial adapter was plugged in, it appeared as “Comm 4“, and the firmware was updated to the latest. The 3 maps that had been downloaded added up to only about 750 kilobytes, and the unit had 12 megs of storage on it, so many more maps can be loaded.
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Work on the starboard rudder continued. The leading edge of the rudder blade was rough looking and after trimming would be short of where the leading edge should be. I cut it off straight and glued on a cedar strip to make up the difference. While I was in epoxy mode, I primed one side of both skegs with raw epoxy.
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The next morning was very chilly and there was frost on the deck. The epoxy of course was not completely hardened, still soft. The cold weather got me motivated to build another alcohol stove.
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The Origo cannisters needed replacement and they are prohibitively expensive, considering what can be done with a soda can. Yes, they can be replaced by a simple “penny stove”. I already had made a simple cannister out of a Fosters beer can and tested it. While looking at DIY stoves, I came across a website that can be found by googling “zen alcohol stove”. It has lots of information about them. I decided to build a “pressurized jet” stove out of two Fosters bottoms. I followed the usual method described on that site and test fired it to see how tall the flame was so that I could design an appropriate wind screen/pot stand. The stove burner needs something above it to hold the frying pan and usually that device doubles as a windscreen. Since we will be cooking in the galley, no wind screen is needed, it is just to hold up the cooking pot.
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I used an empty Chock full o Nuts can. It was too tall, so I cut it down to the size shown in the picture. Holes were drilled around the top edge to allow the flame to breath, as well as air intakes down lower. The plan was to keep the amount of air flow to a minimum while providing enough oxygen for the stove. The pressurized jet design depends on a warming pan, which in this case is the bottom of the coffee can, where a small splash of alcohol is ignited to warm the stove burner, which then begins to burn as the alcohol boils inside it.
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The test firing of the stove, all assembled, used 3 oz. of alcohol in the burner, and boiled a half liter of water in the teapot in 3 minutes. It kept burning for a total of 13 minutes. These numbers compare favorably with those published online of other similar stoves. The larger size of the Fosters can boiled the water quicker than any of the others I saw online. The heat of the stove is more intense than I expected, so to cook without burning the bottom of the pan a “pizza stone’ is used to moderate the heat.
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The picture is of the artistic clamping of the rudder’s leading edge, using a bicycle tube for one of the clamps, and the stove parts are there as well.