gadangit
Member III
How we got here:
I love a good project. I’ve owned and drag raced a 455 GTO, modified a Fiat Spider and my current ride of a modified turbo Porsche that I also daily drive. Well, not any more it is in storage. I took apart a 1906 Craftsman home and rebuilt it to the original glory to match the other homes in our Seattle neighborhood. I didn’t do all the work, but I did the vast vast majority of the work. Demolition, framing, plumbing, electrical, etc. Lisa and I took 85,000lbs of demolition material to the dump ourselves. Yep, we kept all the receipts from the transfer station. Anybody in Seattle has probably seen the Handy Andy trucks, we rented their dumper trucks many many weekends. Fun stuff.
The key to a good project is having the right tools and having the right friends with expertise. Structural engineers, architects, fellow car mechanics, etc. Anyway, I love a good project. And I’m not afraid to be a little unique.
We bought our E39 as a kit boat. The boat was dismasted sometime before we bought it, the PO had bought a new mast, boom and the standing rigging all laying on the rack. He was fixing the water leaking through the deck fittings by putting more tape on the headliner below. We liked the flush deck and shipped it to Kemah from Mobile Bay. At least two people tried to talk us into immediately taking it to the dump and selling the lead. That probably would have made us even, we just paid off the yard to take the boat away. But nope, I love a good project.
One of the reasons the PO ran out of money is because the yard was installing a used Perkins 4-107 and doing a terrible job. No siphon break on the exhaust and they mounted the forward engine mounts directly on the cabin sole. It was stunningly awful.
We fixed the deck and made getting out sailing as soon as possible a priority. In the meantime, I was crewing on any racing boat that would have me. J24, J80, J105, with most of the time on a J80 boat that would eventually run top 10 in NAs and Worlds. The skipper was a former Americas Cup crew for Team Canada way back in the day. I learned to race from some of the best racers in Galveston Bay. I also started doing boat deliveries across the Gulf of Mexico. I was sailing A LOT of miles for a few years. All those racing skippers were put into our own boat’s Guest Skipper Program for our racing weekends. Some drove, some called tactics, one guy stood at the mast on the way out and shouted to every boat we went by, “this boat has an electric motor!!” You don’t advertise an electric motor on a sailboat in Oil and Gas Country…
Back to the boat: for the last time going out of Clear Creek Channel in Kemah the engine quit with an uncaring shrimp boat bearing down on us on a busy Saturday afternoon. We are good in a pinch, but this was the end. We got the main up and got over to the wall and waited for SeaTow. Lots of friends on boats slowed down and checked on us, which was very nice, but super embarrassing. Lisa was looking to me to make this the last time.
I am an electrical engineer. I knew that the 3 phase electric motor is essentially unchanged since Nickola Tesla invented it back in the 1800s. It was the battery technology that really hadn’t advanced from the leyden jar. Elon Musk’s Tesla was barely a company at that point, but I took a flyer that there was real change coming in the battery world and we could limp through for a while.
Out came the 4-107 and the velvet drive transmission. In went a permanent magnet 3ph AC motor that was popular amongst the crazy people who were converting motorcycles and cars into electric. Also, out came the fuel tank and 40 years worth of grime and awful. Our boat smelled amazing for once. The battery plant was four Mastervolt 270 AH AGMs, all 640 lbs of lead. It pains me to think of me getting each 160lb battery down into their custom made box under the stairs.
We continued to race the boat in that state. There were many many other boat projects, like a new rudder, new MaxProp, new sails, etc along the way. It is very easy to sail an E39 to her rating and we won or placed in many regattas. Motoring out of the marina meant getting the main up almost immediately and motor sailing out to the bay. One thing about knowing you are underpowered is you are always thinking about sailing and are never “surprised” by conditions. Sometimes you just have to short tack your way through tight channels.
We started doing some offshore racing in the Gulf of Mexico which was about 25 miles down the Houston Ship Channel. As you all have repeated, the range and speed of an electric motor boat is limited, thanks for the reminder. We had at least one Vanderbilt start when the wind died on the way down. The rules for offshore racing has a section that talks about a boat must have a propulsion system that has a minimum speed for a minimum time. I can’t recall exactly the numbers, but I knew we were right on the edge and, depending on the sea state, deficient in meeting the requirement. The rule didn’t mention sea state, so I just assumed flat calm water. I felt like I needed to make some modifications to stay compliant.
I love a good project. I’ve owned and drag raced a 455 GTO, modified a Fiat Spider and my current ride of a modified turbo Porsche that I also daily drive. Well, not any more it is in storage. I took apart a 1906 Craftsman home and rebuilt it to the original glory to match the other homes in our Seattle neighborhood. I didn’t do all the work, but I did the vast vast majority of the work. Demolition, framing, plumbing, electrical, etc. Lisa and I took 85,000lbs of demolition material to the dump ourselves. Yep, we kept all the receipts from the transfer station. Anybody in Seattle has probably seen the Handy Andy trucks, we rented their dumper trucks many many weekends. Fun stuff.
The key to a good project is having the right tools and having the right friends with expertise. Structural engineers, architects, fellow car mechanics, etc. Anyway, I love a good project. And I’m not afraid to be a little unique.
We bought our E39 as a kit boat. The boat was dismasted sometime before we bought it, the PO had bought a new mast, boom and the standing rigging all laying on the rack. He was fixing the water leaking through the deck fittings by putting more tape on the headliner below. We liked the flush deck and shipped it to Kemah from Mobile Bay. At least two people tried to talk us into immediately taking it to the dump and selling the lead. That probably would have made us even, we just paid off the yard to take the boat away. But nope, I love a good project.
One of the reasons the PO ran out of money is because the yard was installing a used Perkins 4-107 and doing a terrible job. No siphon break on the exhaust and they mounted the forward engine mounts directly on the cabin sole. It was stunningly awful.
We fixed the deck and made getting out sailing as soon as possible a priority. In the meantime, I was crewing on any racing boat that would have me. J24, J80, J105, with most of the time on a J80 boat that would eventually run top 10 in NAs and Worlds. The skipper was a former Americas Cup crew for Team Canada way back in the day. I learned to race from some of the best racers in Galveston Bay. I also started doing boat deliveries across the Gulf of Mexico. I was sailing A LOT of miles for a few years. All those racing skippers were put into our own boat’s Guest Skipper Program for our racing weekends. Some drove, some called tactics, one guy stood at the mast on the way out and shouted to every boat we went by, “this boat has an electric motor!!” You don’t advertise an electric motor on a sailboat in Oil and Gas Country…
Back to the boat: for the last time going out of Clear Creek Channel in Kemah the engine quit with an uncaring shrimp boat bearing down on us on a busy Saturday afternoon. We are good in a pinch, but this was the end. We got the main up and got over to the wall and waited for SeaTow. Lots of friends on boats slowed down and checked on us, which was very nice, but super embarrassing. Lisa was looking to me to make this the last time.
I am an electrical engineer. I knew that the 3 phase electric motor is essentially unchanged since Nickola Tesla invented it back in the 1800s. It was the battery technology that really hadn’t advanced from the leyden jar. Elon Musk’s Tesla was barely a company at that point, but I took a flyer that there was real change coming in the battery world and we could limp through for a while.
Out came the 4-107 and the velvet drive transmission. In went a permanent magnet 3ph AC motor that was popular amongst the crazy people who were converting motorcycles and cars into electric. Also, out came the fuel tank and 40 years worth of grime and awful. Our boat smelled amazing for once. The battery plant was four Mastervolt 270 AH AGMs, all 640 lbs of lead. It pains me to think of me getting each 160lb battery down into their custom made box under the stairs.
We continued to race the boat in that state. There were many many other boat projects, like a new rudder, new MaxProp, new sails, etc along the way. It is very easy to sail an E39 to her rating and we won or placed in many regattas. Motoring out of the marina meant getting the main up almost immediately and motor sailing out to the bay. One thing about knowing you are underpowered is you are always thinking about sailing and are never “surprised” by conditions. Sometimes you just have to short tack your way through tight channels.
We started doing some offshore racing in the Gulf of Mexico which was about 25 miles down the Houston Ship Channel. As you all have repeated, the range and speed of an electric motor boat is limited, thanks for the reminder. We had at least one Vanderbilt start when the wind died on the way down. The rules for offshore racing has a section that talks about a boat must have a propulsion system that has a minimum speed for a minimum time. I can’t recall exactly the numbers, but I knew we were right on the edge and, depending on the sea state, deficient in meeting the requirement. The rule didn’t mention sea state, so I just assumed flat calm water. I felt like I needed to make some modifications to stay compliant.