Carver Owners Forum

Hi Folks and Happy New Year. Like many of you my thoughts are turning to Spring Boating and potential upgrades and projects. I think it might be interesting to hear what many of us have planned for the 2019 boating season. I have three items that I will address. The first is to change out the main heat exchangers on the engines. The boat is 14 years old and I want to be proactive with this as I have had issues this past season with oil coolers. Second on the list is to change out the engine 'sync' indicator module. The indicator never worked properly, I would use the tachs and my 'ear' to find the sync. Also, I lost engine hour count on the port side. My starboard engine hour meter reads around 500 hrs while port reads 350 hrs. May be an issue when/if I ever sell the vessel, however, I have it well documented in my log and I will deal with it when the time comes.
Finally, I want to 'descale' or flush the air conditioning system. In the fall when I was forcing through antifreeze, plenty of gunk came out forward before we saw pink. That unit also seems to be pretty noisy and not as efficient as the salon unit.
Any tips on these projects would be appreciated and lets hear what you have in mind for your boat.

i have a couple things on the list; install the new to me radar arch and hook up the lights on it,rebuild carb on port engine,upgrade stereo to a blue tooth one,finish new bimini top, make windshield covers and bridge cover. There's always the usual spring cleaning,wax and bottom painting.

Happy new year..........Den , I very much look forward to your repair of the sync gage etc as mine is much the same, just not quite as bad and the hour meters still work just fine.

For us will be the new charger install, the new marine elegance toilet which I am still waiting for the price to drop on amazon. Also have to replace the shunt board for the Victron, someone got antifreeze all over it.....hmmm.

I would also like to install some sort of fitting in the raw water suction lines to permit easy winterizing and flushing if needed. Bronze tee 1 1/4" barb.

Put the camera down the raw water inlet thru hull to check the 1/4 turn balls. Thats about it for now but for sure there will be four times that....

Denpooch, I would not be too concerned about your hour meters and selling the boat in the future. Whoever buys it will most likely have it surveyed and the surveyor should have a computer hook up to the engine and can tell you the exact number of hours, including how many hours were run at specific RPM ranges...under 1000, between 2000 and 3000, over 4000, etc. My surveyor did on my Crusader 8.1's.

Hi All! We want to continue making this boat ours. You know, clean, clean and then clean some more. Really want to replace the carpets in the boat, replace the steering wheel" Thanks Hans", look at getting new guages and gps. We might revert to using an I-Pad with Navionics. Then, guess what? Clean some more.

Hoping to convert to electronic ignition come spring. Looking at about a $1200 expense installed.

Need to install the new water heater which was already removed after haul out along with replacing those noisy AC units. Already removed the AC unit in the AFT and confected a register adapter. After this I think I have upgraded just about everything I wanted not to say some odd project may arise.

The area I dock at is getting progressively weedier so I'll be installing strainers for the engines and generator.

If I get bored, I'll relocate the hot water heater aft under the bed and utilize the current area to re-position the batteries and increase the size of the house bank.

We have a stern windlass under the aft bed that has never worked so that's on my list. We throw out a stern anchor often and a working windlass would make things much easier.

Hey Buster, that is good information. I wish my surveyor was as proficient with my purchase as the guy was with yours.

Denpooch; may I suggest RydLyme to descale your AC units with a Sea Flush unit or I guess you could pump it in as you did the antifreeze. I think you'll really see the gunk come out. You may want to descale your engines too and extend the life of your coolers! Good luck with your projects. Only thing I have planned thus far is plugs, caps and rotors in the spring once she's docked and floating. Also have an auxiliary aft fuel tank I have to finish decommissioning and run my underwater plug light to a different power source. Damn that's enough it must be cocktail hour by now!