A Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to Understanding Boat Mechanics

Galen L. Geer: Book covers a great deal of the information I was looking for.

United States on Aug 16, 2023

Placeholder: Not what I hoped for when I bought one for myself, one for an experienced blow boater (25 Chicago to Macinaw races) and one for an experienced motor yacht salesman.

United States on Jun 16, 2023

Mark Bucksey: This was a great buy, some useful information within the book.

Australia on Jun 11, 2023

Samantha Henderson: Quick post no issues

United Kingdom on Apr 01, 2023

D. O'Connor: This is a fabulous book! Learn the words needed to converse with tradepeople or to move on successfully to repair manuals and more specific books. See a quick image (literally - it is full of drawings) of a part or system so you can think about what's going on inside it. Wish I'd see it early-on so I would not have struggled so! Keep it on board and you can quickly understand what might cause that engine click, or stuck valve handle, etc. and at least be able to discuss it intelligently. It isn't a repair manual, as some seem to have expected. I great gift book for someone who just bought a vintage sailboat!

United States on Mar 22, 2022

bill harvey: Great background reading with well thought out explanations of how a boat works but you will also need a fault finding repair book

United Kingdom on Feb 09, 2021

William: The headline says it all. 5 Star product !

Canada on Dec 27, 2020

Smart Dude: This is a great book to gain a basic understanding of the systems on a sailboat (minimal mention of powerboats). Where I differ from some other reviewers is that I do not see this book having a place aboard my boat as a reference source. Any system that I may actually need to repair or install needs to have its own, detailed manual aboard. There just isn't enough detail in this book to rely on it for that purpose. The book is well written and the illustrations are appropriately detailed. I've been sailing for nearly 40 years and yet definitely learned several new things in reading it.

United States on Dec 23, 2019

ARLH: The content of this book is pretty good from what I have read so far and the diagrams used are well illustrated. What lets this book down is that pictures are low resolution and as result don’t look that good. Also, quite a few images are not expandable when clicking on them through the kindle reading application for the PC, this is a big problem as I cannot read what parts on the engine the author is referring to. Zooming in does not work as it just makes the text larger not the images. I would like to have emailed the author first to notify him and give him the opportunity of fixing the problems in the book. But I could not find an email link for him on amazon. Hence the negative review.

United Kingdom on Nov 30, 2018

J. Marsano: Charlie Wing has done a little bit of public service with "How Boat Things Work: An Illustrated Guide", although McGraw-Hill has done a disservice to their fine illustration department by not crediting their work by name. Books of this sort which are extensively photo-illustrated often make things harder to see and understand because of the issues involved with lighting small bits in enclosed spaces and/or scale issues. Clear-line illustration of this sort suffers from none of these drawbacks.

Captain Wing--whose name is familiar to those of you nautically-minded as author of "Get Your Captain's License" and "The Boatowner's Illustrated Electrical Handbook"--reviews boat systems that you'd likely see aboard your 32'-class cruiser. Wing's no stranger to learning in extremis, either--indeed, as he makes clear, he began his journey as the systems aboard his own cruiser successively packed it in over the course of a season.

Section I deals with propulsion, and his overview of the various folding/feathering props should disabuse you of the notion that installing these aboard your boat would be a good idea. (That's not what he says, it's what I inferred. Seriously, the...

United States on Dec 02, 2013