Bill & Sue Ashenhart

FUJI 35 Ketch - 'SWALLOW'

Swallows-and-Amazons-For-Ever!

This list got so long that TRIPOD was having problems editing it. I broke it up for my convience . Please click on Repairs Previous to see the last page.

An Abbreviated List of Repairs - Page 2

The following is a list of some of the more time / money consuming projects which I have performed in the last year. If you think that you can buy a boat which need repairs or clean-up and get away with a minimal investment in either time or money, then read over this list. You will probably need to perform similar things to your boat, so hopefully this list will give you something to think about.

The Raytheon Mariner 1200 Radar had no display when powered on. I removed both the display unit and the radome and returned them to the factory for repair. They confirmed that the high voltage transformer was bad. Total cost to repair the radar was about $280.00 including shipping. A definite bargain when compared to the cost of a new radar. The Rathyeon service technician was extremely helpful and answered a lot of questions. Based on his attitude alone, it makes me want to continue to use Raytheon products. The Raytheon Marine Home Page is at http://www.amana.com/rmc. By the way, he did tell me that in his opinion, this radar, with its old CRT style screen was superior to the newer LCD displays from a readability basis. This repair was not a real time consumer, maybe 6 hours total to remove and reinstall. The hardest part is having to work from a bosons chair and the need for someone to hoist you up.

I needed to either repair or replace the Autohelm 5000 autopilot. This is an obsolete autopilot and is no longer supported by the manufacturer (Raytheon) therefore repairs are not possible. I disassembled the control head for the unit and found significant water infiltration onto the circuit board. The compass in this unit uses a small electric motor to rotate the sensing mechanism. Due to crud on the motor, this motor was not able to overcome the friction loads on the compass. After cleaning the circuit board and motor with an electronic spray cleanser, the autopilot appears to have resumed working. I need to perform additional testing. If I am not able to repair this unit then I am contemplating hooking up an inexpensive linear autopilot for a tiller to interface with the Monitor Windvane which will then control the helm.

The original Wilcox-Critteden Headmate Head was filthy plus the pump mechanism was leaking water at every joint. A complete pump rebuild kit was in the boat from the previous owner but even if I rebuilt the pump, my wife stated that she would refuse to use the unit. She wanted a new CLEAN toilet and seat. Being a relatively smart person about things like this, I agreed. BOAT-US very conveniently placed the Wilcox-Critteden Headmate on sale for $99 dollars a few weeks later.

The boat came with two (2) 6 pound propane tanks which were clamped to the stern rail with some oversize hose clamps. This didn't appear to be the greatest method to me. I built and installed a box on the port side of the stern pulpit which allowed me to protect the bottles plus hold them securely.

The refrigeration system consists of an Adler-Barbour Cold Machine. At some point after the installation, a water cooled heat exchanger was placed in the refrigeration condenser line along with charging connections on both the high and low pressure sides. The R-12 level was almost non-existent in the system. I happened to have (1) 16 oz can of R-12 refrigerant left from the old days when I use to charge my car AC system. I installed about 12 ounces of R-12 and frost started forming on the coils in the ice box. The charge lasted about a month so there is a slow leak somewhere in the system. At this point I am thinking about changing the system over to R134a refrigerant. Then again I may just say to heck with it and jerk the whole thing out. I do have one comment about Adler Barbour. They must have the worst customer service department. I have sent them several e-mails , left messages on their WEB page and tried calling them (busy signal) to obtain additional info about my system and the possibility of conversion. They have not responded to any of my attempts. I would have at least expected to send back an e-mail saying that they do or don't recommend it but I have had zip/zero/nada from them. Oh well, I I replace then there are other manufacturers out there and I will be shopping around.

The faucet for the galley sink had severe corrosion and leaked. I went to West Marine and bought a new faucet for somewhere around $24. I then had to use a cold chisel to take apart the old unit since it was so corroded. In addition to the fresh water system, the sink is plumbed from a push button floor pump to provide a salt-water rinse to the sink. I had originally looked in a Home Depot and found a faucet that I like better than the one from West Marine. But, it turned out the spout of the Home Depot unit was about 1/2" too low and interfered with the salt-water spigot.

The faucet for the sink in the head is a dual action unit which controls both a sink nozzle and a shower wand. The diverted mechanism was frozen. I disassembled the faucet are returned it to working order. This was a 5-minute job and I wish they were all this easy.

All of the manual fire extinguishers were out of date. I purchased four (4) new ABC grade CG approved extinguishers and installed them at various locations in the cabin and cockpit locker.

I installed two (2) battery operated smoke alarms, one in the engine compartment and one in the main cabin.

The mizzenmast is stepped using 6 shrouds to the deck and a triadic stay from the tip of the mainmast to the tip of the mizzenmast. The deck-mounted shrouds are 5/32" 1x19 stainless steel wire. They appeared to be the original mizzen shrouds and had several broken strands with the resulting 'fish hooks'. I decided the easiest method of replacing the shrouds was to drop the mizzenmast and do everything on the ground. With a friend of mine helping, I hooked the main halyard to the radar mount on the mizzenmast and by using guide ropes I was able to lower the mast. The entire process, including a ride up the mainmast to unhook the triadic stay required about 4 hours. By dropping the mast, this would also allow me to repair the strobe/anchor light on the top of the mizzenmast at my leisure. The turnbuckles on these shrouds were the original 23 year old factory closed barrel design, so while I was at it, I purchased six (6) new 5/16" open body turnbuckles. I took the old shrouds along with the new turnbuckles to a local rigging shop and they fabricated new shrouds in about a week's time. Re-stepping the mast, mounting the radar and all tuning took about another 6 hours of time. The total expense came out about $400 with me doing all the labor except swaging the fittings onto the wire. The local rigging shop quoted about $900 to replace the shrouds so I saved some dollars plus was able to fully inspect the mast while it was on the ground.

While the mizzenmast was down I removed the radar mount. There was a significant amount of corrosion under paint on the mount. I stripped the paint, acid etched the aluminum surface, used a chromate primer and epoxy topcoat on the mount.

The battery charger on the boat is a Dynamote 12 Volt - 20 Amp dual output unit with a built in float and equalization functions. The only problem with it was that it didn't work. The fuses would blow immediately upon turning it on. In conversations with the previous owner, he mentioned that the battery charger had received a voltage spike at a marina in Mexico. I checked it out and discovered the bridge rectifier was shorted out. I was able to go to an electronics store and obtain a new 40 amp rectifier for $4.95 . That fixed the charger and it has been keeping the battery's up ever since. The schematic in the operation manual really helped. Now, the only problem with the charger is its installation location. It is installed on a bulkhead on the port side of the engine compartment behind the ice box. It is almost impossible to get to so hopefully it will continue to operate and not give me any problems.

SWALLOW came with an Aqua-Signal Tri-Color light, a wind speed indicator and a Windex wind direction indicator all mounted on the top of the main mast. Of course, all 3 items had problems. The tri-color sailing light was burned out, the Windex direction indicator was corroded and non-functional and the wind speed indicator had been wired with a section of cheap stereo speaker wire that had disintegrated in the sun. All of these repairs were relative easy, except of course for the part of having to use a hack-saw to remove frozen bolts on the wind direction indicator and soldering new wires for the wind speed indicator while sitting in the bosons chair at the top of the main mast.

All of the halyards were worn out. They had obvious frayed spots plus they were stiff from the salt and dirt accumulation. I replaced a total of 6 halyards - Main, Jib, Spinnaker, and inner forestay jib, mizzen main and mizzen staysail. I felt that I needed to do this before it would be safe to use these lines to be hoisted up the masts in the boson chair.

This is an abbreviated list of the repairs performed. I will add other as I get a chance to type them up


SWALLOW was named SIENNA III when I purchased her. She was and still is documented with the USCG. This necessitated that she be re-documented in my name upon purchase. When I sent in my documentation papers I debated about renaming her or not. I finally decided that I would rename since I had told myself years ago that I would someday name a boat SWALLOW. The reason may be found at Swallow's Name . I still have not had an official renaming party with all the trappings. I have been working on her the past year getting her back in cruising shape and plan on a christening party in the near future.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with my FUJI 35. It has the head room in the cabin such that I can stand erect and not hit my head ( I'm 6'2"). The cabin layout is relatively good and has a Cheoy Lee look with all of the teak that FUJI used. You can tell that this is a traditional John Alden design by looking at the interior of any boat in the FUJI line and then looking at any other ALDEN designed boat. They all look very similar. The cockpit has room for 4 or 5 people if you are out with friends. It sails well. It is stable. If your boat has the Perkins 4-108 or 4-107 diesel, then the engine is probably in good shape since that engine is a sturdy workhorse. This size of engine is possibly oversized for the FUJI 35 but then again it is better to be over than under powered. The fuel consumption will be greater for the larger engine but unless you are planning on motoring for days on end and want to conserve fuel, I don't think that it is a problem.

I don't think that I will need to worry about storms or rough water with my boat. The last owner was knocked down a couple of times during a severe storm off of Nicaragua in 1995. He was injured with broken ribs and blew out his sails but the boat came through the storm undamaged.

I am the 4th owner of this boat. I have also spoken with the 2nd owners. They live in Alaska and sailed her, back when she was still known as SIENNA III, from Alaska to Mexico and all points in between for 11 years. Most of their time was in and around Alaska. They have nothing but praise for the strength and seaworthiness of FUJI's.

SWALLOW is Hull #61 and was built in 1974. The deck consists of two (2) layers of 1/4" mahogany plywood covered with a thin layer of fiberglass and a glued on non-skid compound. The non-skid looks to be about 1/8" thick and is made from some type of a rubber compound. The last owner painted the rubber non-skid because he said that it absorbed too much heat from the sun in Mexico. He did not place any grit in the paint however so the result is a surface that is now slick. In addition, the paint is beginning to flake up in small pieces since the surface it is a resilient rubber and the paint is rigid. I am planning on using a high-pressure water blaster and hope to remove as much of the paint as I can. I will also test some paint removers but am concerned about their effect upon the underlying rubber surface so I need to be careful about their use. I haven't decided if I am going to repaint the deck or return it to it's original condition.

I have deck leaks on both the Starboard and Port sides of the boat where you step through the lifeline gates. These leaks have caused the plywood core to deteriorate at these locations. Since this is also at the junction of the cabin bulkhead into the cockpit, the vertical plywood bulkhead over the quarter-berth has also rotted in a small area. This isn't a major structural problem but I do need to get it fixed plus every time it rains I get water dripping down onto the quarter berth area over the batteries.

Well the previous paragraph is not totally true. As of August 1999 I found that the bulkhead between the cabin and cockpit of my Fuji 35 had water infiltration and subsequent delaminating and rotting of the mahogany plywood. After I tore out the old bulkhead, I used cardboard and chipboard to make templates for the replacement plywood. Since this was a weekend project, I used the blue foam to make the opening weather-tight until I put in the new bulkhead. My neighbors thought I was 'loco in la cabeza' because I used some cheap chip board (basically pressed sawdust) for the template and then left the foam in place for about a month. They thought that I was going to use either the foam or the chipboard for the new core. :-) Once the cockpit bulkhead was in place and fiberglassed but not yet finish coated or painted, I made the mistake of deciding to work on a couple of cracks on the fiberglass on the foredeck. I ended up removing the entire foredeck and port sidedeck all of the way back to the cockpit due to delaminating of the plywood deck core. I also removed the old fiberglass deck cover on the starboard side. I have laid new marine plywood and the deck is dry and sealed but I still need to lay fiberglass on the deck. BUT - It's just to darn hot this time of year in Texas to work on the deck..... Steve P has been through this on his Spring Moon and he has given me so great pointers. There is a link to his page on the bookmarks section. Terry on Osprey is directly behind my boat and he has also helped with suggestions such as how to polish stainless steel with a 10,000 RPM angle grinder and a buffing wheel. This has definitely been a lot of work, much more than I had intended. Once it is over I will be ready for a good trip somewhere along the Texas coast. My Admiral has threatened me... She says that all of this MUST be finished by the end of December or I have to sell the boat. LOTS of fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A few pictures of the current state of repairs.

As a side note, make sure that you batteries have a cover over top of the battery box to protect them from filling up with leaking water. When I bought SWALLOW I had to borrow a battery from the broker to even get the engine started. Water leakage had filled the battery boxes and ruined all four of the 6 Volt T-105 batteries. All because there was not a simple cover over the boxes.

The brochure which I found in my boat indicates the deck and cabin top utilize balsa for the cores. If you read the brochure closer, you find where it is talking about the 'NEW Fuji 35 Ketch' which indicates to me that there was an earlier version. My deck and cabin top is definitely plywood and I suspect that boat hulls lower than my #61 are similar.

See the FUJI 35 Brochure for a reproduction of the FUJI 35 brochure that I have. (Hyperlink here in future - I haven't yet scanned in the brochure)

I have put together this site because when I bought SWALLOW I could find very little information about FUJI sailboats. I am glad to be of any help I can with respect to FUJI's. Unfortunately, like any boat, they have both their strong points and weak points. Probably the biggest problem with any boat of this age will be the fact that they are a quarter century old. There will be a lot of things which you will want to upgrade, modify and will need repairing. However, they are a classic looking boat and I have a lot of people stopping, admiring and asking questions whenever I am on mine. You will also not find many boats with the headroom in the cabin which the FUJI provides. What I do like is that the FUJI is a very stable boat, in fact that is the main reason that I purchased a boat of this size. My wife just didn't feel comfortable ( read safe) in the smaller boats such as Catalina 25's. The hull is also built like that proverbial brick out-house. The cockpit has room to move around although I am a little concerned about the shear volume of the cockpit and how fast it will or will not drain if it is filled by a wave. Of course, with 4 drains each hooked to its own thru-hull, it should be better than a lot of other boats with 2 drains which are then hooked together into a single thru-hull.

Galveston Bay is relatively shallow and has a flat bottom which ranges from gooey mud to sand to oyster beds and oyster shells. Average depth is 10 feet but there is significant shoaling in areas plus spoil banks from Corp of Engineer dredging of the main ship channel up through the middle of the bay. If I am going to go aground, I would much rather do so with a full keel boat and than a fin keel. The integral, skeg mounted rudder is also comforting since there are also large areas of crab traps with the associated floats and poly rope they use. A free standing rudder and open props just seem to invite these tangling objects.

I highly recommend you check the entire deck , both from the top side and underside for any deck leaks. I will almost guarantee that there will be some leaks at the chainplates. If the boat has the masts off of it then I recommend that you pull each of the chainplates and look for corrosion at the deck level. In stagnant conditions where oxygen is depleted (such as in the caulked area around a chainplate) stainless steel can actually have accelerated corrosion. If you cannot pull each chainplate, then at least inspect everything you can see.

The thru hulls on my boat use gate valves instead of ball valves. I am replacing them when I get a bottom job done but at $50 to $75 per valve plus another $150 in labor ( if I don't do it myself) it will cost me close to $1,000 just to put on the new valves. I'm in Houston and the boat is in the water year round. The ship yards charge $250 to Pull-Block-Launch plus another $25 / day for storage so I don't have the luxury of pulling the boat for the winter and replacing them when I get around to it like people up north. If your boat is out of the water then I recommend that you check / replace the thru-hull valves before launching.

As I previously mentioned, there are a lot of thru hulls on a FUJI. The cockpit drains alone put 4 holes in my hull, each 1-1/2" in diameter. Check all of the hoses carefully.

The hull on my boat is rock solid. It has a few (2 - 3) blisters about 3" in diameter but considering its age I'm not worrying about them. I am not planning on messing with them unless they start to grow or more jump up. There are almost no storage facilities around here where I can pull a boat and leave it in a cradle for an extended period of time to allow the bottom to dry. The 2 or 3 yards that are large enough to have a storage area end up charging $15 to $20 per day!!!

I have an Edson worm steering gear in my boat. The whole rudder system is heavily built.

I'm not extremely happy with all of the doors to access storage areas in the cockpit. The doors go down to within a couple of inches of the sole of the cockpit and would appear (at least to me) to allow water to enter the engine area of the boat if the cockpit were filled by a heavy sea. They may not be a big problem and if I start worrying too much about them I will probably just put a layer of duct tape over the seams during offshore trips to slow the water seeping thru the cracks if the cockpit did fill up.

As with any old boat, you will probably have a lot of electrical wires running all over.

Check the post under the main mast. This compression post also serves as the hinge point for both of the doors entering the head. Look in the bilge under this post to make sure it is still in good shape and hasn't been crushed. You can also look at the door frames around the doors to see if the frames are out of square with respect top the doors. Look at the striker plates for the door latches to see if they have been moved. Open and close the doors to see if they stick and that they latch properly. Go out on deck and look at the cabin top around the mast for any depression or cupping effect. Standing water on the cabin top around the mast is a sure sign of compression post failure. What you are looking for is any failure of the compression post under the mainmast. You will most likely find some minor movement but you just don't want any major failure.

The fuel and water tanks are molded into the bilge. Mine don't leak and I hope they don't start because they would be a bear to repair.

Be sure to get a surveyor to perform a complete once over for any hidden surprises. The BUC lists FUJI 35's for about $48K to $55K but a lot depends on the boat. If your boat has been sitting for a couple of years and is missing much gear then remember that you will be spending a lot of money just to get it back into decent shape. Also, regardless of however much gear is on the boat, you will probably want to buy even more, so save some money for WEST Marine and BOAT/US to get. Offer a low price (20K to 25K) and work your way up. This is what I did and I ended up getting my boat fully loaded for 21K. Of course, the guy I was buying from was about to lose his house and everything else so he was happy to simply get what ever he could. Also remember that regardless of how minor any problems you find with the boat, it still takes you 4 times as long to perform each minor repair as you originally allocated. Go back down to the boat with a flashlight and sharp knife. Crawl all over it and poke your head into all of the crevices. Spend at least 4 to 6 hours doing this and be very critical of the boat. Find all of her faults! Tell yourself all of the reasons not to buy it. Remember that this is a 24 +/- year old boat.

Anyway, after inspecting and agonizing, go for it!! Put in a lowball offer. All the seller can say is NO. Work your way up on the cost. Of course if you are a seller then ignore this advice and ask for the moon.

If you do buy a FUJI, I think that you will be very pleased with it. Regardless of using it for weekenders or long range cruising you will have a strong comfortable boat. To get something even similar to it in a new construction would require you to buy an Island Packet or a Gozzard at 150K to 200K. At this point it will require something major to make me get rid of mine.

I have the Perkins 4-108 with a Balmar #9115 dual output Marine Alternator. At 3,000 RPM (alternator rotor speed not the engine speed) this alternator puts out 100 Amps, @ 5,000 RPM it generates 120 Amps and @6,000 RPM it is rated at 125 Amps. I haven't checked my engine pulley diameter or the engine speed so I'm not sure exactly what the alternator is putting out , but I know that it is between 100 and 125 Amps. This is used with a Lestek #6116 regulator.

I currently have three 125 AH Group 29 12 volt batteries. The alternator charges 2 of these batteries with the third battery hooked up to my solar panels. I also have a small 650 watt Honda generator for emergency use if I were able to kill all of the batteries while anchored out. The generator could recharge 1 battery enough to start the engine.

I think that #9115 is comparable to Balmar's #912-100 (100 Amp) Alternator which they sell today. They claim that this model is for boats with house banks of 400/600 AH load ranges. If you go to Balmars WEB Page there is additional info. Also, West Marine carries this alternator in their catalog.

If you are a FUJI owner, I am interested in hearing of your experiences. Do you have any specific problems, any comments, or any warnings about things to look for on my boat? Any hints, tips or info on FUJI's would be appreciated.


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