Winter is a good time to do all those little jobs that make using the boat as easy as possible . It often means improving and refining make shift ideas used in the past season
An example is my F RIB.. It could do with the Yamaha 6HP outboard lifted around 15mm..to ensure the cavitation plate is not too deep below the transom. I didn’t suffer from spray being thrown up. In fact it was a beautiful clean wake..but I always felt it was marginally more efficient with less drag due to the deeper propeller depth.
My Brother’s F Rib 330 however ..suffered a significant spray throw up from his Yamaha 6HP.
He cured it by using a wooden transom spacer..which was just a block of 15mm thick wood. It worked well.. but he keeps his boat assembled all summer.
My problem with the method he used.. is I was always forgetting or losing the piece of wood. So I tended not to bother with a spacer. However it was always on the back of my mind to make a better solution.
This is what I came up with.. . I cant loose or forget the spacers now..nor will I curse as I fit the outboard and inadvertently knock the wooden spacer off the transom . Two wooden spacers cut to the size of the outboard clamps.. with a couple of cable ties threaded through holes drilled in the spacers.
A splash of paint to make them look like expensive bought bits.. and use cable ties to attach them to the outboard clamps.
Its now very easy to put the outboard on a mount or transom ..as the spacers are a “fit and forget fixture”. If I want to remove or change them..its a simple case of cutting the cable ties. They don’t interfere with the lifting mechanism either.
Another little DIY job out the way to make sure my boating experience ... come the spring..is kept as simple and enjoyable as possible.
