Unboxing and fitting the HydroAxe Rope Cutter
We follow Adrian, the owner of SV Falcon as he takes delivery of his new 3 blade HydroAxe Rope Cutter and installs it on his a Beneteau Oceanis 45.
Video transcript
This is our Oceanis 45, it is a 2016 Beneteau Yacht fitted with a SD60 sail drive.
The challenge we have had is to find a rope cutter that is going to work on a Yanmar SD60 sail drives and this Flexofold propeller. I think we found one now – and it is called a HydroAxe.
Unboxing the HydroAxe Rope cutter
Time – 1:00
This is the unboxing of the HydroAxe rope cutter that we have to fit on a sail drive. We have the Yanmar SD60 on an Oceanis 45 yacht. It’s hard to get good quality rope cutters to fit on sail drives.
It is made by British made engineering company, Darglow based in Dorset in southern England. It comes in good packaging, wooden box.
There are installation instructions these are all available on their website – very simple follow.
Then some thread locker and then the main unit itself.
Lots of good packaging and these are some extra parts which will do in a second.
Here’s some extra packaging, obviously for carriage.
And then here is the rope cutter with its dedicated anode already fitted to the back end of it.
There is an additional spacer and also for the Yamaha SD60 there’s a plastic spacer. So this spacer firstly goes onto the sail drive itself, and this spacer goes on the shaft.
Extras in the box, only because we’ve ordered extras. We’ve got a spare anode – this comes in two parts. With the cone anode that we have ordered as well, although that is pretty standard size.
And because we’re fitting on a Flexofold, folding propeller there’s a dedicated nut that is used to fix that propeller on.
The length and sizing is different because of the rope cutter and this is the dedicated nut together with the pull tabs.
So that is what you get in the box. Most importantly you are having a dedicated sail drive rope cutter. The main differences with this compared to some of the others on the market – you have a rear backing plate that the locking pin fixes to.
So, the static part of the rope cutter is actually connected to a stainless-steel plate, that itself is bolted to the sail drive. That makes it very secure. And also, the anode for this fitting is in two parts – that means if you need to replace it you don’t have to remove the rope cutter from the shaft.
And lastly this rope catcher is designed to go onto the shaft in such a way that when the Flex-o-fold propeller goes up to it, it fits directly onto this collar. There’s no need to machine the Flex-o-fold propeller in order to fit this rope cutter.
Those are the three main elements that make this (certainly for us) an attractive proposition.
Fitting the HydroAxe Rope cutter
Time – 5:30
The work involved today is removing the new anode that the yard put on, and then put on the new sail drive anode. But we are going to fit a rope cutter, the HydroAxe. Which means taking off this anode, taking off the Flexofold propeller off the shaft and then fitting HydroAxe rope cutter and then putting the Flexofold propeller back on.
Rope Cutters for Beneteau Yachts
The HydroAxe rope cutter can be fitted to many of the models in the Beneteau yacht range. We keep an expanding database of technical information on many of our installations along with feedback from our customers.
Special thanks to Adrian of SV Falcon
- 3B HydroAxe
- Yanmar SD60 sail drive
- Beneteau Oceanis 45
- 3B Flexofold propeller
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