If you wanted some one to look into vibration issues on a boat in Fort Lauderdale who would you recommend?
Rich Merhige at Advanced Mechanical Enterprises, Experts for vibration, noise & alignment issues. Excellent staff of engineers.
You'd also do well to speak with Chris at High Seas Yacht Service. He's handled my alignments for several years, and I've found them to be very good and reasonably priced.
Joe Smullin at http://www.jandaenterprises.com/jis.htm is actually a rocket scientist and is very good at noise and vibration measuring, identifying and recitfying the cause.
Is Joe still consulting in the field? I know that he stepped back from the day to day running of the core business of Sound down Engineering a few years back and his son Sam Smullin has taken the reins with some very qualified people on staff. If Joe is still at it then he certainly can I.D. the vibration condition. .
Thats news to me as I am aware he was in Europe doing something for our project last week and he hasn't said anything in regards to this in relation to project where we have him as the S and V Guy.
While he may still be consulting on Sound & Vibration with J & A for new build projects he has stepped back from the manufacturing and acoustic insulation side of Sound down Engineering and his son Sam runs that entity . Joe's in good shape but is in his early seventies and is enjoying the finer things in life with his wife.
Thanks for all the replies. The more I look into the vibration the more I feel the issue is with the underwater exhaust gases getting into the stream of water feeding the props. Causing what I would term aeration or ventilation. And did recently get some confirmation of assumption by a fellow who was involved in the building of the boat. He said it was an issue with the boat right out of the box that apparently neither the builder nor any previous owners have bothered to address. While I know this is not an uncommon issue with boats with underwater exhausts that exit forward of the propellers. And I have seen strakes installed to direct the flow of exhaust gas away from the props. I don't want to go about this willy nilly and just guess at were the strikes should be located and how they should be shaped. Because I can see how if they are not shaped and placed correctly they could do more harm than good. So if anybody could direct me to some one or some yard that has experience in this I would appreciate it.
This may be completely irrelevant since I don't know the builder or the age of the boat, but my first question would be...Have you spoken to the builder? While they didn't address the problem on this specific boat, perhaps they did on a future one.
I intend to. But I don't hold out much hope since they didn't see fit to correct it at the time it was built. And it's my understanding they were well aware of it.
Well, sometimes they might deem it too much work to correct a delivered boat (one they've already been paid for) but it could be easy to correct going forward. Just hoping.
That is what I would focus on and have some long talks with the factory to see what they changed, whether or not it cured it, etc. etc.