After dragging a hose up the mast and spraying down the wind transducer a couple of times it hung on until the Beneteau cup. Prior to the first race it stopped, but then gamefully worked during most of the racing bar a couple of slow downwind sections but on the way home reaching at 7+ knots it just gave up the ghost.
So this time I took it off and cleaned it "properly".
Getting it off took two trips up the mast as the screws holding it on were pretty stuck. A second attempt with lube and an impact screwdriver did the trick.
Once off I took it home and stuck it in the kitchen sink and flushed lots of simple green through it. Starting off with it fairly hard to turn (friction by hand and nothing if you blew on it) things loosened up and now I'm happy say it needs just a whisper to get going.
You can see how dirty it had got in the pictures below. Much cleaner after a good wipe down!
The smoke in the middle of the panorama was due to a helicopter crash on Camp Pendleton.
Edit: Since cleaning the transducer has stirred in the slightest breeze and starts moving before any of the others I see in the harbor around Kraken. I'll write a post up about how I approach climbing the mast once I get some good pictures of the equipment.
No comments:
Post a Comment