Brilliant Simplicity
At some point in your boat owning career, it’s likely that you’ll have to tension the belt(s) on your engine. If your experience was like ours, the belt(s) were hard to get at, and you used some kind of lever to pry things apart to create the proper amount of tension.
The only problem was, you could have used a third arm and hand to tighten the necessary nut(s) to maintain the tension. If only there were some tool to maintain that tension for you while you tightened everything up.
It turns out there is. James ‘Twinger’ Tantillo, who was formerly crew on Profligate in the Ha-Ha (and a good friend), reports that he purchased "a cool gadget some time ago" that fit the bill. It’s so simple that it’s brilliant, and it’s obvious how it works from the photo. James had a chance to use it for the first time on Katherine II, a friend’s boat — and its utility was immediately apparent.
Where do you find one? We don’t know. We did a little Googling on the Internet and didn’t unearth anything.
Does anyone know where to buy such a simple but necessary device? Do you have any wondrous tools in your tool box? Let us know.