Re: [Amel Yacht Owners] Bow thruster
Andrew & Kate Lamb
This will not help you Jose but I am going to mention the problems I had with my bow thruster for the benefit of the forum.
When we first bought the boat and were “virgin” Amel owner we did have quite a bit of leaking from the bow thruster on our first voyage, when we were crossing the Gulf de Lion.
Since then we have replaced the seals and foot oil each year and have adjusted the rigging to ensure the foot is always pulled up tightly against the seals, when the thruster is in the up position. However we have had a lot of problems both with the raising and lowering mechanism which resulted in us changing the linear actuator 2 years ago, changing the sensors and rebuilding the control box. This part of the system now seems to be working very well. Having thought our problems were over, last year the bow thruster main motor stopped functioning – there turned out to be issues with the connections of the coils in the armature and commutator - I made some fixes to this (documented on this site) and the motor started functioning again. It has been ok since until last week when the motor failed again.
I contacted Maud at Amel (whom incidentally I have always found to be very helpful) but she told me that these motors are no longer manufactured and at the moment they have no solution to offer either in terms of replacement or reparation. I have found a local motor engineering workshop near Perpignan who reckon they should be able to repair the motor, by changing the commutator and possibly some coils – however if they are unable to repair the motor then we have some serious thinking to do to figure out how we can get a working bow thruster again and we may have to even consider a more “conventional” approach to this. It is sobering to think that increasingly we may find that when parts of our boats malfunction that we may not be able to get replacements.
Andrew
Ronpische SM 472 Canet–en-Roussillon
From: amelyachtowners@... [mailto:amelyachtowners@...]
Sent: 8 June 2016 13:24 To: amelyachtowners@... Subject: RE: [Amel Yacht Owners] Bow thruster
Good morning Jose,
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