Giles and Paula's Great Retirement Adventure
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I have a feeling that all the tanks that they buy-in will have this issue. I think that when the MD understands the issue (I dont think he is being told exactly the issue by the CS team), there will be a massive face-palm and a contrite apology.
We bought a boat that is specced to do about 1,100 miles on full tanks at 10 knots, we are getting less than 900 miles. That is pretty fucking embarrassing for Sasga...
The UK Sasga site, managed by Chris the Broker, says that the 54 (though is now called the 55) will do 1600 miles at 9 knots. I told him that he better change that pronto because it's bollocks
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@Giles from what you've been saying here. it definitely looks like a design flaw. at least with the tanks and where the pumps are located.
almost seems very similar to some motorcycle tank design issue where if the fuel gets too low and the motorcycle is parked on a side stand, it cannot draw fuel into the lines to start the engine.
hopefully that'll knock some sense into them and get on it. on a side note, will we get to see her next week when we're there?
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fingers crossed. the health of the engine comes first. hope she purrs
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Sounds like Sasga doesn’t share IH’s ‘over-engineered is our starting point’ outlook on their products.
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They’ll probably come through and make it right.
Appears that their claim “X miles at Y knots” was measured on their prototype boats, which are never identical to the production ones. Since their customer base doesn’t test the products to their limits, they never heard about the limitations you discovered with Sakura.
If so, beyond covering your expenses to date, you deserve some freebees as a beta-tester for the brand! -
When we installed the FLIR (which is a game-changer), we unintentionally obscured the masthead light. So yesterday Matt (one of my fishing chums who is also a carpenter )and I (well, I was on the boat) raised the mast and thus the lights 120mm. Job done.
Before and after...
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Today we moved diesel around the boat and tested various scenarios. We know that the engines fail at about 30%, so we wanted to double-check that there was actually 30% of fuel left in the tank when that happened. I know that we know, but Sasga basically don't appear to trust me or Chris (or 8 Volvo engineers for that matter) to have a brain and so we wanted to prove there was fuel left in the tanks at the point of failure not just me being a dumbass and not calibrating the tanks properly
We got to the point of failure and then emptied each tank, and sure enough, we got about 400 litres out of each tank after the engine failed.
A really important point is that we could suck all the fuel out using a 50LPH transfer pump, but the fuel lift pump could not pull (or at least was shut off by the EMS at about 30% fuel. Maybe the fuel lift pump is not man enough to lift when the fuel gets below a certain level, perhaps the addition of an electric fuel lift pump would solve the problem. Or I could build a high-level "day tank" that was filled by electric transfer pumps and gravity would help the fuel lift pump (this has some elegance as I could make sure that the fuel in that day tank was super clean and water-free before it gets to the primary fuel filters.
400 hour service booked as well.
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Sounds like you're on to something @Giles. I'd venture a guess that as the tank volume gets lower, you lose the hydrostatic head that assists in pushing the fuel out of the tanks. As you lose the hydrostatic head as the tanks are mostly depleted, sounds like the lift pumps can't keep up with the fuel requirements so the ECM kicks in and kills power. Not sure if you could have them install a lift pump system that works in tandem or a more substantial lift pump. I'm sure the fuel pickup in the fuel tanks is intentionally set higher than the tank bottom to allow for small amounts of water that might inadvertently make their way into the tank. As diesel has a 0.84 SG, any water would settle out on the bottom of the tank. Hope they can get it squared away soon!
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Sakura is lovely. Thanks @Giles for showing us about. Shame about the weather (winds)..
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That dog bone turned out well! Seamless transitions
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Thank you. There is a tiny irregularity where the 2 buries cross in the middle. Not enough to cause structural concern, but it is fucking with my OCD, so I have bought some Dyneema chafe-guard sleeving that I will integrate over the middle 200mm. The trouble is, it is coming from, Australia, so won't be here for a while....
