Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I’ve been invited to a friends house for turkey and drinks. I’ll get some video of the “babies” . She has three sloths as pets, they are very cool animals.

I’m really excited about making a few bucks with the videos. I am going to take your suggestions and play with the price point as well as increase the production value.

I’ve finally determined that the Pulley for the alternator on the Kubota was too small and took the entire assembly apart, and good thing I did.  If you look in the picture you will see one pulley,a plate beneath it. and a shaft on top. For some reason Cruise Power (no longer in business) decided to manufacture the shaft and backing plate from aluminum?It just wasn’t very strong and as i was taking the assembly apart the shaft broke off. It would not have been long until the load of the alternator broke the shaft. I need to have it remanufactured out of steel. Also the key in the shaft was steel and would not come out of the key way as steel and aluminum are dissimilar metals and corrode at the joint. ARRRRG, I am learning a lot though and I’m happy about that.

Check out the beautiful sherwood pump I got on ebay. This was a new (discontinued) pump. The new model, as was this one are about $350.00. I got it on ebay for $35.00, and $25.00 to ship it down here. I paid $9.00 for the pulley. I need to drill out the pulley and tap a set screw into it but at the end of the day I’ll have about $70.00 into it :) 

I’m back to the idea of running everything off of belts again. For me to modify my cat pump to electric I’m looking at about $600. If it’s belt driven a pulley will cost about $10.00 and I don’t have an electric motor to break, maintain, or repair. Keep it simple right?

You know I got this whole idea from AquaGen. The motor in the picture is a bigger version of mine and is 6HP as opposed to my little 3.5, but it consumes half of the fuel. They have a serpentine belt running everything which is kind of cool and i like how they have the raw water pump running on the shaft. I may try to put the membrane to my watermaker under the engine in the same way.

When I have the plate for the pulleys manufactured I’m going to make it long enough to accommodate 4 belts as opposed to the two it had. At some point I’d like a dive compressor and will run a hydraulic pump off of the kubota for the dive compressor.

At the end of the day I’ll have a really cool system, that is what i keep telling myself anyway.

If you haven’t seen my last video yet go to the store and cough up your buck, you can see my little kubota in action!:) You can also buy tickets for the Charter Raffle, there are 28 tickets left.

Cheers

Sail far and live slow.

Alex

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