Update on the Com-Pac 16 "Foundling"

[Mas]

Hey Bilge, don't hesitate to contact the CDI folks. they were great to deal with and the furler we had was an ancient version (well over two decades) so that sending them some pics and also having them on the phone while i worked on it was huge. The manual was still helpful though the version they have now is different from what we had.

Alright since you have not responded to my offer to give you three times what you paid for her guess that means you have wisely decided to keep her! Not sure what i would do with two of them anyway, well actually know some folks who would love one!

[JBC]

Bilgemaster. I didn't catch that you had a CDI furler on another boat when I posted my longwinded instructions in my previous post. My instructions are for such a furler, which you obviously know something about already. But the more I look at your pics, the more I realize that except for the extrusion tape, nothing else looks like a CDI furler. I still can't figure out what you've got and, therefore, how it should work.

One guess about the spool (drum) is it looks like it handles a continuous line. I know nothing about these, except they are a different beast. Your open spool doesn't look like it would allow line to wrap up like the traditional models. But even so, I can't figure out how that spool would keep line from slinging off sometimes (there is no guard that I can see). Oh, well....hope you get it figured out!

Jett

[Bilgemaster]

Jett:

Rest assured that there is absolutely NO need to apologize for trying to help out this noobie.  For all I know it IS a CDI FF1 furler--maybe an older model...maybe it's been modified...I just don't know.  Just because I have a CDI on the Magregor doesn't mean I have the faintest clue what I am dealing with on the "Foundling."

You earned that "Karma" fair and square.

Well, I'm off to the boatyard now to take another crack at my handmade motor mount.

[JBC]

Thanks!

[Bilgemaster]

So here's a shot of that homemade motor mount block I'd mentioned.  Don't be impressed--What we have here was basically just eyeballed for general size in "finger widths" from an actual store-bought one found on another CP16 in the boat lot, hoinked out from some random slab of leftover wood that was lying around mouldering under our backyard deck, shaped a bit into a roughly keystone shape with an old belt-sander, finished with a little hand-sander wearing some 100 grit, brushed off with a handy snot rag (that's what gives the woodgrain that lovely "glisteny marbeling"), slopped with a couple of coats of Ace Hardware's old school Gloss Spar Varnish (a real bargain by the quart, and which acquitted itself perfectly respectably for its low cost in recent Practical Sailor Exterior Wood Finish Testing...Besides, I like that lovely old school antiquey-windjammery tall ship smell compared to polyurapoxywhatever-thanes), and held with four 2" crowned stainless carriage bolts, washers and nuts.  Lining up those bolts so they'd be nice and firm in their bores was the tricky bit.  Once in place, and after I had taken this picture I slopped one more coat of that Spar Varnish on her:



Here's what she looks like with the little Mercury 2.5hp 2-stroker kicker motor mounted, shown at its lowest setting.  This motor was a bit of craigslist luck: cost me only $100...delivered to my door.  The deal was, "$200 running, $100 if not."  The fellow was just trying to clear out a bunch of random nautical crap left behind by a buddy who'd since gone back to England.  He couldn't get her kicking, so I took a chance.  After pulling off the carb, scraping out a couple of spoonfuls of long-crystallized goop, pulling the jets and emptying a can of spray carb cleaner throughout and giving the fuel tank a little rinse too, I put in some fresh fuel and oil mix with a dash of Marvel Mystery Oil, and she fired right up.  So, now I've got a shiny little Mercury 2.5, which can be beefed up to a 3.5 sometimes by just removing a little restrictor plate from the intake...sometimes with a new carb slide (likelier in this particular later model case), depending on the model year.  The older Tohatsu which came with the "Foundling," virtually identical to this Mercury, had already been modded in this fashion, but runs overall a tad "fussier," so it's going onto my dinghy for now.  My hunch is that she just needs to stretch her legs a bit with some decent fuel after having just sat for over a decade.  Besides which, the Mercury's all nice and really shiny.  Not bad for a C Note...Thanks Devil Ethanol!:

[Chris D]

That is a beautiful motor mount that you have there. Much prettier than my old scratched piece of plastic. I can't see the back of the wooden block to see if it is reinforced with something, but please make sure that the block of wood won't snap off with your motor along the horizontal wood grains. I hope she serves you well.
Chris

[Bilgemaster]

Chris,

Your point is well taken: In retrospect perhaps I'd have done better to orient it with the grain running top to bottom.  With that said, it is one beastly stout chunk of well-aged oak. My hunch is I could maybe hang the Magnum V8 360 from my old black Durango tow beast seen in the background from that board with no ill effects to it, let alone my little 30-something pound Mercury or Tohatsu.  Still, I'll be sure to keep a good eye on it...Maybe eventually screw a couple of brass or stainless strips into it, either vertically front and back, or perhaps around its very circumference should I suddenly be overcome by some manly true handworkerly urge of yore and trip over some brass stripping somewhere.

Bilgey and friends get down to it all brassy and "old school"

Meanwhile, in a world without handworkers...

[Bilgemaster]

Well, it looks like Mas and crazycarl were right about CDI and their staff being helpful.  Also, to JBC's credit, it seems that what we have here IS a CDI furler...just an early "continuous-line" model made in maybe the '80s or early '90s, before the company was taken over and they started making the "single-line" types they do now.  Hence the family resemblance.  The one on my "Foundling" is apparently something called a "CDI Micro Continuous Furler."  Sure, if you think: "CDI" = "Seedy Eye_®", then "CDI Micro Continuous Furler" could sound a bit like some sort of 24-hour salacious circus or sideshow act you might catch through a peephole in the seedier parts of Amsterdam involving dwarves, elastic medical tubing and maybe some Vietnamese potbelly pigs in a sort of twirling sling-shotting musical chairs romp.  But no such luck.  It's just my dumb old furler shown here:





For the ready reference of any folks who may find themselves baffled by such a rig in future, here is the pleasant and helpful email I received from CDI's Taylor Warren (Please note that email addresses and other direct contact info have been stripped out so this good man doesn't wake up to a steaming pile of spammy effluent in his Inbox were the "spambots" to harvest them online):

From: "Taylor Warren"
Date: Apr 5, 2017 9:45 AM
Subject: RE: Is my furler a CDI FF1 as some believe?
To: "Bill Connelly"

Good Morning,

Thanks for the information and the photos, glad to hear that the Com-Pac has gone to a good owner. I'm sure it already looks much better!

That would be an older CDI Micro Continuous Furler. It was produced for a very short time in the early 90's. It doesn't have a stainless steel cup like our modern systems. All it would use is a continuous line that fits right in the slot of the drum. Unfortunately we were never passed on much information/ parts on those systems when we took over CDI because of how long they were produced. The one concern I would have is if the drum is sitting on top of the body of the turnbuckle. It is hard to see exactly but you would want a gap there or there is a chance your drum will spin your turnbuckle.

What I would recommend is depending on the measurements of the luff extrusion we could update the bottom section of the furler to the current FF1 model. If the measurement of the luff extrusion is the same as the FF1 systems (I believe it is) it would be a very easy swap over.

Sorry we aren't much help with the older systems. You will have to send some photos of how this project turns out!

Have a great day.

Taylor Warren
Cruising Design International
1036 Waverley St.
Winnipeg, MB
R3T 0P3
www.sailcdi.com

I might go with that FF1 upgrade he describes some day, but for now, having actually found some rather positive, even glowing, reports and comments on my old-style freaky-deaky furler "out there" in Boat Forums Land, I think I'm gonna try to make a go of it, once I get my hands on a fid and figure out how to splice together some big old continuous loop to hopefully control what I've got.  And yes, I might well cross-stitch the bristles from those lascivious and far-flung Potbelly Pigs into whatever I may come up with for added resilience and stiffer line control.

[JBC]

Cool!

[Duckie]

I don't know if this would work, but after watching someone messing around with spectra line, I think an easy splice would be do-able.  If you can use 3/16 line, get a length of spectra hollow weave and simply use a fid to insert one end into the other end to make a loop.  Shove the inside line as far into the other end as you can get it and it should never come apart.  If you are suspicious of that, stitch some nylon thread into the joint and it should never come apart.   Except for being a little thicker at the joint, it should wrap around the furler with little to tell it is there. 

Al

[Duckie]

Oh, I forgot about this one.  To make a loop, simply pass one end of the line through the other end about six inches from the other end and pull out about six inches of the line that you passed through the first.  Switch the fid to the other end and pass that through the first line about 1/2 inch behind the first crossing.  Keep doing that for a couple more passes, then bury the ends inside the line.  This is unbreakable because the line has been passed through itself from both directions and simply cannot be pulled out.  Once there has been some tension on the line it will pull down to the same thickness as the other method I mentioned.

Al

[Bilgemaster]

Thanks for the splicing tips!  Having caught a few demos on YouTube, where it all seemed straightforward enough at least, I went ahead and ordered a cheapo 3 pack set of Wellington Cordage fids for like 4 bucks to give it a whirl with some lengths of that Harbor Freight Diamond Braid stuff until I get it right.  Sure, I'd love to have a $100 set of gleaming stainless Samson or Selma fids, each presumably forged and hammered out by hand by elves in some magic forest and annealed in Essence of Unicorn Burps_®, but I don't really plan to start doing this splicing thing professionally...or maybe ever again, if I can help it.

In the meantime, last evening I had a bit of an insight breakthrough when I swung by the lot on the way home from work: while waxing off some of the Winter's crud, I finally took a good look at a line which has just been sort of sitting in a little heap on the starboard foredeck the whole time I've had the Foundling, but had never given much thought to--just another random ratty-looking length of rope festooning the craft when I got her.  Well, it turned out on closer examination to be a long loop, running through a sort of plastic fairlead hoop attached to a mounting on the gunwale.  So, it looks like I've found the PO's continuous line for the furler.  The line's dark and mildewey and ragged and even "crunchy" in parts with a stapled-together "splice" covered in electrical tape, which overall looks like it might have been done by volunteers from the Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind, but at least I now have a working model so far as length and thickness and routing of a continuous furler line that presumably once did the job.

Well, I'm off to the boat lot!

[Chris D]

Bilge,
Your probably right about that wood being a solid chunk of oak. I didn't realize that. Love the picture, LOL, and brass would be pretty sharp and salty on that. Enjoying the essence of unicorn belch seeping through the keyboard.
Chris

[Bilgemaster]

Fellow Mariners,

It is my pleasure to announce that after just over a year of scrubbing and sawing and scratching myself a new baldspot, yesterday afternoon the Foundling resumed her rightful place in the waves for the first time since maybe the Clinton Administration.  Here is a shot of her having just returned from her three hour tour, during which she acquitted herself like a real lady:



Lest we forget, here was the lamentable state in which she was found:











All told, including the single dollar I paid for her (which was, granted, a real Morgan Silver Dollar on the theory that I really ought to pay a real dollar for a real boat), it has cost me precisely $571.60 to get this girl proudly back into the drink, if you count the gleaming little "optional" 2-stroke Mercury 2.5 hp motor I picked up off craigslist several weeks ago for just a C Note to take the place of the still workable but somewhat fussier, yet nearly identical older little Tohatsu 2.5 that came with the boat. That includes some parts for that Tohatsu outboard, $198.02 in boat and trailer registration fees, armfuls of dollar store cleaning products and knockoff DampRid moisture removers (that work every bit as well as their far pricier cousins), an optional new 2" hitch coupler and a pair of very non-optional trailer wheels and tires, a quart of Ace Spar Varnish, another quart of Blue Water Marine Regatta Red Ablative, a marked-down quart of that great medium-grey Aqua-Guard Aqua-Gloss Marine Enamel for the cabin bunks, a bunch of marked-down panels of lovely Scandinavian Spruce and bags and bags of scented bagged "shelf-worn" tealight candles from the local Ikea Markdowns Room, and a turnbuckle for the starboard shroud from the good folks at Hutchins (who were kind enough to toss a few complimentary ring-dings into the package). That and a bunch of found objects and other stuff already on hand sufficed to get her back into the water where she belongs.

The moral of this whole story being that if I can do it, then almost anyone, even a small new family just starting out and really struggling along as many of us do, could still handily afford to get out there and enjoy those shimmering days on the water like yesterday if they've really a mind to, just like your Kennedys, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.  They just need to find the right little fixer-upper and apply a bit of elbow grease and maybe just a couple-few bucks a day to it...I mean, even with some optional items added in my case, we're looking at just about a buck-fifty a day over about a year.  I'm talking less than "Starbucks money" here.

[GeeW]

Brilliant to see another CP-16 returned to the fold, you certainly deserve a lot of credit for the labour of love you have bestowed upon her.
I hope you now get the weather to enjoy a wonderful summers sailing aboard. Enjoy

Regards

Gordon