Motor in place... temporarily

Yes, it had it's first fitting today... like a fitting for a suit or a dress. And yes, there are adjustments to be made. But not with needle and thread, but welding torch and milling machine.

Ken and Louis got the side plates and end plate ready for the first fitting and sadly, the side plates were very slightly wrong. However, as the english phrase does 'a miss is as good as a mile' so the plates were taken off back to the workshop for re-machining.

The plan had been to fit the motor, then remove it to have it epoxy painted. My feeling after today is that when its fitted we leave it there and epoxy paint what we can in situ.

Tomorrow should be the next fitting.

We found out over the weekend that the manufacturer of the drive controller had different firmware installed to what the manual specified. This means the wig-wag controller (their language) or the Morse controller (sailing language) will not work. Great. Not! So I sat down over the weekend and designed some basic electronics to overcome the problem. Amazing what you can do with a 741 op-amp.

Yesterday we negotiated with the company that supplied the motor to send us a programmer by express air freight so that we can re-program the controller to work correctly with the new electronic throttle that I designed. We now have a tracking number so that we know its on its way.