October 24, 2011.

The box showed up on Monday as promised. The weight said 33 pounds, probably a new zinc inside, close enough. I opened the box and peered inside. I unwrapped the bubble wrap and was greeted by the cry of “dude, ¿que pasa?”. In spite of his quirks I was relieved to see our Max starring up at me from the bottom of the box looking fresh and revitalized. So it turns out that 6 years ago we were told we were getting an 18 inch prop and I took their word for it. It turns out Max has been a 20 all along. It was still early in my workday so I stuck Max under the boat and went about my day.

I finished up the installation of a new style wind generator. It's an AirMax and seems to be more popular on the west coast than out here in the east. It's the first one I've seen and the Taswell 44 I put it on will make an excellent test platform.

It only weighs about half as much as the newly popular D-400's everybody seems to want right now. As soon as it went on top of a new Kato telescoping mounting pole the wind pretty much died so it'll be a while before I find out how it performs.

After lunch I had to make a road call on an older Passport Yacht. I ended up replacing the raw water pump on their Perkins 4108. The noteworthy thing about this part of my day was that this 4108 was SPOTLESS. The boat itself was pristine but that is often the case. The woman who owns the boat takes advantage of the wonderful engine access and keeps her engine as clean as any I've ever seen.

That killed the day and it was back to the Veranda to reinstall Max. That's about when the wheels came off. Crap.

The MaxProp has a central hub that slips over your prop shaft. Then there is a 2 piece “spinner” that you bolt together covering the central hub. Everything was perfect until the last little tweak of the wrench. The spinner didn’t spin. It should rotate freely once its in position on the hub. Loosen the bolts just a hair and it was fine....but it ain't right. F@#k me. The central hub assembly comes assembled but the bolts are only firm. The difference is miniscule but once the bolts are tightened everything locked up.

So now instead of finishing the prop installation tonight and putting the boat in the water in the morning there’s a new plan. I'm going to have to take the morning off so I can polish the internal journals to allow clearance for the spinner to actually spin. It galls me that I have to rework this after 2 weeks and close to 2000 dollars spent.

I called PYI and spoke to the technician who suggested that I overnight it back to him and he'd polish it and turn it around ASAP. My suggestion was that maybe he should have done it correctly to begin with. I'm finding myself fantasizing about really bad things.