While we’ve had the boat in Olympia these past couple months, we’ve been working with one of my brothers on designing a new custom stainless steel stern arch for Mosaic. He’s a pipe fitter and welder professionally and has a bunch of stainless tubing that a friend gave him.
Installing a new stern arch will allow us to move our solar panels up from their current spot on the hard lifelines at the cockpit up above our heads over top of the cockpit. PLUS we’ll be able to purchase two more panels and double our solar power. Whoop!
We’ve wanted a solar arch from day one, but the hefty price of ordering a custom arch made it a project that just couldn’t make its way up the list. We’re SO grateful to my brother for donating his time, skills, and even supplies for this project which will improve our power generation and improve our boat systems immensely. Thanks for your support, Clay!
Here’s our existing bimini structure which we’re replacing with the new arch and our current solar panel set up.
Last summer, we got in the habit of swinging our boom way off one side of the boat (like seen above here) in order to try to eliminate shading on the panels from the boom. It would help in certain situations, but the panels were most often shaded by the entire bimini structure over the helmstation.
Having the panels down low on the rails wasn’t ideal, but it was the best we could do with the existing bimini structure. We didn’t feel it would have been strong enough to take the weight of the panels.
Here are the design drawings for the new stern arch structure
This stern arch will provide placement/mounting for:
- Four 160-watt Renogy solar panels
- New mount for our BNG radar unit
- Our dinghy outboard engine on the port side horizontal bars
- Our soon-to-be-purchased liferaft on the starboard side horizontal bars
The existing hard lifeline rail which encircles the entire stern of the boat will stay in place. The existing bimini and canvas will be removed, along with the existing radar mounting pole which comes up from the stern. Our dinghy davits are a separate structure which will also remain in place.
We are also incorporating an extra support bar (yellow, above) at each end of the new arch which will be used for a new simple canvas bimini cloth which I’ll DIY to protect the cockpit from rain and the elements.
It’s also all going to actually be tall enough for Brenden to be able to stand up underneath it (as opposed to the existing bimini), so that is pretty exciting!
Thanks for reading. We’re super stoked on this project and the improvements it will allow for our boat. I’ll definitely keep y’all updated as we progress! ~Rachel