Way2slow

lo n slo, you have two things working against your on getting top dollar for yours. Javelin is no longer in production, so people get spooked by that and think it would be a bad buy. If it still has the OMC engine on it, OMC is no longer in production so people think it will be hard to get parts for them. Both of these conditions make not so ideal for someone trying to get rid of them. Javelin is a good boat, there are so many OMC motors on the water and so many parts are interchangeable on them, it will be many years before parts become hard to get. However, that has nothing to do with the average person's mental concept of the situation.

I've been looking for a 24' pontoon trailer for a few months now. My wife calls me a little bit ago and said she just bought one from some lady for $2,000, (about $400 more than I would have offered if it was the right one) but it's going to be next weekend before I can see it or get it. She knows absolutely nothing about them, this one is "supposed" to be 24', according to her cousins measurement, nothing about the age, condition, if it's single or tandem axle, (I need a tandem) or even if it's the right width, all she knows is it was galvanized. Then she calls and ask if that was OK. I tell her I guess it will have to be if you've done bought it. I'm just hoping now, we haven't thrown $2,000 away.

Deephaven If you happen to read this, I just made a couple of loaves of bread using that "Wild Yeast" starter I've been growing, and that stuff made an incredible loaf of bread. However, it's not your regular sour dough, nothing even like sour dough, absolutely no tangy, sour taste to it, just a nice rich flavor. One note though, it has to be made in the spring time, before the temps get much into the 80's and it's recommended temps are in the 60's. This one I made using a piece of cheese cloth over the jar, and fresh ground hard red wheat to start and feed it every time, and let it stay outside for two weeks feeding it every twelve hours after it got active. I did bring it in a couple of nights when the temps were going down into the low 30's. Then I placed it in the fridge and feed it every 24 hours for another week. After almost a month, I decided to try a loaf with it. My wife and daughter don't like sour dough bread, and they both said that's the best tasting "sour dough" loaf of bread I've made. It has a very unique flavor. Now, it has never gone more than a day without feeding it, so once it goes into the storage mode, only getting fed once a week, or once a month when I try some that way, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm also going to start feeding a jar of it stored with all purpose flour, eventually converting it to all purpose and see if it keeps the flavor it has or converts to the typical sour dough starter. I'm hoping it retains it's flavor. It's going to suck putting all this work into it and it converts to sour dough in the long run. However, I am keeping one fed regularly with fresh ground wheat, just as a backup if the other converts to sour dough, in an effort to try keeping the flavor it has now. I also did these in Dutch ovens and not as hearth breads.

Yea, but I was talking about while in a boat and moving around over the pond. Not much in the way of depth and contour to be gotten sitting in one spot. Like others mentioned, maybe one of those units you can cast out and pull back would give you a bit of the depth and contour under where you can reach with it. But then you are right back to what you can feel with a lure. I can pretty much judge depth by how long it takes a worm or something to settle to the bottom, and can feel changes in contour as I retrieve it when I'm just sitting in one spot.

I guess I have a different thought on using a sonar from a dock or from the bank. Not sure what that would accomplish. Casting a lure is going to reach anything a sonar will and if you are doing things right, it's going to catch fish, if they are biting. The more commotion you create to more it alerts the fish and they will move away or shut down if they know you are there. Normally ponds are shallow and what you did get an image of would be a very small cone. Unless it's something like a quarry pond they dug almost straight down and very deep. It seems to me like the only practical unit would be a side imaging, with the transducer mounted on something you could put in the water and slowly rotate and then you could scan from where you are at out 50 or more feet. Just my personal opinion. The only thing I use a sonar in a pond for is to see the depth and contour, and a cheap flasher of small LCD unit does that just fine.

I've never seen a need for one of those. Mine is 4 gal per minute at 3,600 psi with a 13hp gas engine. It takes a high volume of water as much, if not more than it takes pressure. Before this one, I had one for a couple of months that was 2.3 gal per minute at 3,000 psi, before I sold that one and got one big enough to do something. I can only say it was better than a high pressure nozzle on a garden hose. One word of caution on use one to clean the carpet in your boat, it will mat it down a make it look bad if you get the nozzle to close to it. At least one with good pressure and water volume will.

Marine plywood is always more expensive. They made it sound like this was regular pine plywood, the stuff that's normally $35 - $40 a sheet

Supply and demand, builders can't get materials to meet the demand, and what they can get is costing them a whole lot more. Somebody told me they were at Home Depot the other day and a sheet of 3/4" plywood was $96, that's up two to three times.

I kept my bass boats under covers for 20 years and found out, it's cheaper to buy the best grade material you can. I started off thinking no way I was going to pay hundreds of dollars for a cover when I could get one in the $100 price range that fit just fine. Every couple of years I was buying another one of those cheap covers. I was at Bass Pro Shops in their discount section and found one of those high dollar covers on clearance for just a little more than the price of the cheap, light weight covers I bought for it. It lasted eight years and when I came time to replace it, I bought one of those high dollar, heavy weight covers that I said there was no way I would ever pay that much for a cover. They are actually cheaper in the long run, but yea, it's a hard pill to swallow right up front. However, for what I spent of covers over the years, it would have been cheaper to buy one of those metal carport things and not had to mess with covers.

Nobody has a monopoly on "one of them days" I've had more than my fair share over the years, as I'm sure everybody else has. That's the one nice thing about being retired. When having one, I can just say "p**s on it, and just not do anything else for rest of the day, hoping the next day will be better. As for the snake, how about being 15 and in a boat with a retired Army major that always kept in 1911 on his side and scared to death of snakes. Then have a water snake fall off a limb as you a passing under it into the boat, and the guy starts unloading his 1911 into the bottom of the boat. The only saving grace was this was just a ditch connecting two ponds and was only about three feet deep.

That was for the 8 years before I went into the Air Force and the 25 years after I retired from the Air Force. For those 33 years I was on the road and as a service tech, traveling about a 1/2 of the state working out of a service van. There were times I drove over 100,000 miles a year and seldom drove less than 85K. As for the deer hunters, we don't have enough, that's one of the problems. If you don't own land, about the only way you can hunt is be a member of a hunting club or state land. They have a bag limit so high now, you could probably kill a whole herd and still be legal because of that. Makes for a long day when you have to drive 150 miles, work six or seven hours, and you next call is 100 miles in the opposite direction so you can't spend the night, or you would have a 250 mile drive the next morning when the customer is expecting you to get there early, not that afternoon. Pay was good, but the job sucked when it came to all the traveling. Bunches of 70 and 80 hour weeks, because of the traveling.

Sounds like the last guy I worked for. I usually always did my own work, but was backlogged with a couple of jobs I had going, so I sent one job to the home office to be done. When the customer showed me the bill he got, my jaw dropped. What I normally did in four to five hours max, they charged 20 hours labor. I called up there to question it, the owner says they bill it so the slowest, newest guy in the shop could do it twice, because he usually has too. I promised him I would never send another one of my customers piece of equipment to the home office for repair again.

Ok, that's actually good. Less chance of it having been destroyed on it's first charge. What you may be experiencing is where I mentioned they can Stratify from going to long without a booster charge. Do like I mentioned, baby sit it for the first couple of charges, not letting it get too warm until it cuts off and goes into the float mode. I would not use the AGM setting until I got some voltage readings. You really don't want a float voltage above 13.2VDC. AGM may give you more than that. Check that after it has been in float mode for 24 hours. Plus, as I mentioned AGM and flooded cell batteries have different peak levels of charge, but since your charger is not one of the three hundred dollar chargers designed to give the absolute max life, that may not matter.

Is this an AGM or a Flooded cell battery. There are two types of flooded cell, those with the caps and those they call "Maintenance Free" without caps, these are not AGM's, just flooded cell batteries with smaller plates so they can hold more electrolyte from the factory. After the warranty runs out, it pays to peel the label off, pop the plugs out and add water to them. Both of these type flooded cell batteries will bubble, that is required for them to properly charge. Now, the Adsorbed Glass Matt (AGM) battery does not has any free electrolyte in it, it's has a synthetic material between the plates that is soaked in electrolyte and normally you should not hear bubbling in it. I guess I should say I've never noticed it in one. Flooded cell batteries can handle a bad charge much better than AGMs. I have seen new batteries that sat on the shelf for long periods without a booster charge stratify. The first time they are charged they will over heat because of this. What I've done is charge them at a slower rate and if you are not using a temp sensor, when the battery starts getting warm, stop the charge, let it cool and then start charging it again. Basically, nursing it back to where the charger will charge it properly once you get that first initial charge in them. If the battery is getting warm quickly when being charged at 10 - 15 amps, the battery most likely has a bad cell. That's when you take it back and make the seller connect it to a 10 - 15 amp charge and see if it does the same thing and when it does, tell him you are ready for that new replacement. I ready where you said it did pop over to the float mode. Normally, it can take several hours for a battery to bleed off enough of the surface charge to get a proper float level voltage. For a true flooded cell deep cycle battery, the ideal float voltage is usually 13.15, to 13.2 VDC. (13.17 is considered ideal) AGM's are usually 13.4 The cutoff voltage is different for the two also. It's been a few years but I think AGM's are about 14.2 and flooded cell are 14.4. They each have different levels they charge at during their charge cycle, that's why a good smart charger is recommended. Most batteries also require a 15% over charge to balance the cells, again the reason for a smart charger, the hot box chargers can't do that.

You need to understand, the words "Brand New" does not guarantee to be a good battery. That's why a new battery comes with a warrantee. Depending on where you buy a battery, they can be many months old from sitting on the shelf. And don't trust the stickers on them, that's just the date that battery was placed in the store. I've known a few that will pick them up after several months and put them in another store with a new sticker on them. The actual manufacturing date is coded on the battery and is as protected as to what a dealer actually pays for the car he sells you. As for charging a deep cycle, all manufactures recommend to charge at 10% the rated capacity. If it's a 120 amp hour battery, charge it at 12 amps. For the first 80% of the charge, you can charge them at 20 to 30 amps, but doing that it's recommended you use a charger with a temp sensor to prevent what you have experienced. It's very important to charge flooded cell batteries at the recommended rate. If charged too slow, they don't gas, and that lets them stratify, which is the acid and water separating and the acid getting concentrated in the lower half of the battery. Smart chargers do just that, they charge at their max capacity until the battery reaches approximately 80% charge, and then they cut back the charge rate. Now, there is always the possibility the charger may have lost some of it's "smarts" but I'm more inclined to believe the battery is bad and has a shorted cell in it. Usually it takes several hours for a battery to get hot enough to go into thermal runaway like you are referring to, unless it's bad, then it can get hot very quickly. Most good onboard charges have an optional thermal probe that can and should be connected to the battery. That keeps the plates from getting too hot, the charger automatically cuts the charge rate when they start getting warm. Which I've seen very few people ever use. As a battery gets warm, the internal resistance gets less, causing increased heat, and this keeps on adding up. That's why everything thing you read tells you not to charge a warm battery, let it cool before connecting a charger to it. The biggest problem you are going to run into is finding someone with enough smarts to realize this. Most just stick their Midtronics tester on it and say, oh it's good. Also understand, each type of battery has it's own charging conditions, so trying to charge one type of battery with an automatic smart charger set for another type could lead to overcharging and damaging a battery. I guess this was a long winded way of saying you probably have a bad battery.

I was referring to the main power switch on the console. They don't normally put those on a separate switch. That's so all you have to do is turn the power switch off and cuts the sonars, pumps and everything off. Even most of the separate switches are wired to the Power switch provides power to them.

I've totaled over 3 million miles on Georgia highways and this is only my second. Hit one in my service van about 15 years ago and this one. The one in the van only knocked one head light out, so I have been fortunate. My wife hit one in her first Highlander. Tore the front end up but air bag didn't go off, so she was convinced there was a problem with it, so with 31,000 miles on it, she traded it for a new one. Couldn't tell her there wasn't enough impact on the bumper to set them off.

Did you have the power switch on the console turned on? It has to be on the get power to those wires.

Georgia averages over 35,000 insurance claims a year from deer collisions and they mostly turn out much worse. My granddaughter hit one (actually two at the same time) a few months ago in her brand new, one month old Nissan and they totaled the car, over $13,000 in damage to the front end.

Now to rub salt in the wound, a little bit ago, I get the email saying the part I ordered just shipped.

Have a part on order for the 90hp Mercury I'm rebuilding but still haven't gotten a shipped date and I would like to get it on the boat this weekend, so, I go to the nearest dealer, 45 miles away and get the part I needed. On the way back, had a deer try playing chicken with the front end of a 2004 VW Beetle. It lost and went flying over the top of the car. Luckily, it hit dead center and went over the top and not into the windshield. From the initial looks of things, it looks like another $75 hood will take care of the damage. Now, if I could be so lucky as to find a red one, that will be great, but so far, bunches of hoods to be found but no reds. I'm going tomorrow to get one from a place that says they have several, but the don't keep track of the colors. If I have to paint it, that will be another $100. Then again, being able to do it myself, even if it cost me $200 is a small fraction of what a body shop would want. They would be about 10 times that.

I'm too much of a realist for that junk. Those and the super hero movies, total waste to my notion. I find myself just sitting there thinking how stupid most of the scenes are for someone to think something like that could happen. Because of that, I can't just sit down and enjoy a movie for what it is, I find myself just picking the stupid scenes apart, so I don't go to the movies. Back when Alien first came out, my wife wanted to go to the movies. That's the last time I've been to those type. True Grit, First full of Dollars, Green Beret's (I was in that one, got $35 for being a dead man. It was filmed at Ft Benning while I was in college at Columbus, but did get to meet John Wayne) those were my type.

Sound like a dealer I was going to buy a 2001 Camry from. This was toward the end of the year and I was wanting one with ABS brakes. There was one at another dealership somewhere like I wanted. This one was fully loaded, leather seats, alloy wheels, sun roof, the whole package and couple thousand more than I was really wanting to pay. We finally negotiated a price that was about $4,000 less than the sticker price and told them to get it. When we went to pick it up, they tried the team approach, with the sales manager coming in and say because this car had, this and that, it was going to be more, almost $3,000 more. I told them they knew that before, and we had already settled on the price. They said we could make a deal if I could come up some, I told him I could come up a lot, up out of my seat and walked out. Went to another dealer ship about 25 miles away and ended buying almost the same car, just a different color, I liked better, for $4,500 off the sticker price. Later that day, the first dealership called me trying to strong arm me in that I had made a contract to buy that car and they had it brought in for me. I told him where to go and he voided that contract when he tried to hustle for more money. I've owned six Toyota's, three have been Highlanders, since then and have never put foot in that first dealership since.

One more time, it does not matter as long as you do it smart As transmission temps get above 200f, the life of the transmission is shortened. At 210f, you cut it's life and half, at 220, it's cut in half again. For each 10 degree increase you add another half life. When you try start trying to tow much of anything at interstate speeds and especially if you try it in overdrive, the transmission temps are going to rise drastically. Yea, you might be able to tow the Queen Mary with a Tacoma, but for how far, how fast, and how long. The ONLY way to know what and how you can safely tow (that's not accounting for stopping it) something is with a temp gauge installed in the transmission. Without that, you are playing Russian Roulette with your transmission, and if you keep the vehicle for a few years, you will learn the hard way. If you listed to what a some of these post say, you are going to have an expensive lesson to learn if you keep the vehicle. Now, I'm not saying you can't or you can easily tow what ever you want with a Tacoma, I'm just saying don't go at it like a blind man, do it smart and have a temp gauge to monitor the transmission. Like the old saying, pay a little now or a whole lot later. With over 50 experience with this stuff, I know I would never tow without a temp gauge. I've done it long enough to know just how fast the transmission can start to over heat. Of course there is the old saying about advise "A wise man usually doesn't need it and a fool doesn't listen to it" so don't waste you time giving it.