Aquarius Sail Owners

Please forgive my perfectly terrible manners in letting this thread hang for the better part of a year, but spring is (finally)(sort of) here (we thought it was spring, anyway - it was +25C the other day - then we got a few days of snow and it's around freezing again. Grrr....) and that means gettin...

After a false start a few weeks ago (a 12-hour day yielded a 15-minute sail after both rudder lock pins went to bits - old UV-killed plastic, got replacements from Tom) I finally got out for a couple of proper (though still too short) sails. 1. I'm still running the stock '83 wraparound tramp and wi...

Yeah, it's quiet out here, alright. Starting some new 19 threads.

The beauty of the rope is that you can always get your foot under them (even wearing shoes) without using your hands. You don't want to lace them "tight", leave an inch or so of slack so you can push your foot under them. With a flat webbing hiking strap they tend to stick to the tramp wh...

The "hiking ropes" thing is new to me - I've never seen a boat that used them instead of straps. Nor do I know how many years this was carried forward, or if in fact they're still in use now. In this tramp's configuration there are six grommets for each rope - two at each end, two in the m...

Piece by piece I'm getting this old 19 reassembled for the first time in many years, but soon it'll be time to knock it back down for trailering to some actual water . When I brought it home cross-country in November, the tramp was off, so whatever combination of ratchet straps, bungee cords, and a ...

Solved. I got a little sample of ACF-50, and though it certainly didn't hurt, it didn't allow me to tap the pin out either. If I'm chicken and afraid to hit it hard enough, so be it - I'm not going to risk this casting. I dug out my old ball joint press (really just an oversized C-clamp) and was abl...

I probably could have gotten going with the old ball, but it looks like 40 years of UV exposure and I'm trying to clean up as many loose ends as possible. So I carefully cut off the ball, and now I can't get the roll pin out of the base (the forward end of the pin was already broken off). That 40 ye...

The roller furling cleat was installed on the starboard side of the boat along the flat section of the tramp track. The forward hole in the cleat shared forward tramp track screw. Depending on the type of cleat that was used, some people found it helpful to route the line under the forward beam and...

Problem solved: I'd already loosened off all the beam bolts, so I removed both from one side of the forward beam. With them out, the tramp slid in, no sweat at all. With the tramp in place, the beam/hull holes were offset 1/2", maybe a little more. I thought it'd be harder to get them realigned...

To be clear, the problem in feeding it into the track isn't that the track is pinched or otherwise damaged. Everything is round, smooth, and clean. This is simply a case of the tramp having shrunk over time (years off the boat), so it's difficult to feed it in without having the bolt rope jam. Think...

Thanks for the tips. The grief I'm having is just with feeding the bolt rope in at the end of the track - once it's in, it's sliding through fairly easily. So I don't know whether running the scotchbrite through there is going to help. And why the vinegar? But I am lubing it with a little dish soap....

Yeah, I'm thinking it shrank over the years. Perhaps if I tried to install it on a really bright, hot day, it might relax enough to go in without all this futzing around, but, you know, half the season will be gone by the time that day rolls around. 1. It's the old-tyme wrap-around. I think this was...

The 19 I acquired last fall is out of the snowbanks and I'm about to start putting it together - apparently it hasn't been sail-ready for half a dozen years or so. Figured I'd have an easy start with getting the tramp strung, but right away it's giving me grief - can't stretch it into the tracks, wh...

Thanks, Matt. I get it (from the manual the '83 stock (furling?) jib looks like the zippered-luff halyard setup I'm familiar with from the H18), though I can't quite visualize how the self-tacking jib is affixed below the bridle - if anyone happens to have a picture handy it would help. So would I g...