Trying to Get off the Hard

The past two weeks have gone by so fast I'm starting to panic a little.  We're doing everything we can to splash by Thursday (today!). Was supposed to be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... We were supposed to be driving back to AR yesterday... We're still waiting on a couple parts.  A spacer for the drive shaft, and the tiller head.  Last week it rained 2-3 times a day and all night every night.  It didn't help our plight much, but many of the passing rain showers only lasted long enough to get everything closed up and tarped.  We worked through it. And if it rained all afternoon, there was always something we needed at Ace, and Lowes, and Chapmans, and Harbor Freight, and West Marine, and Lewis, and Mariner Metals, and MR Woods.  Our homes away from home.  Ace the friendly place...

There is a crack in the keel seam between the lead and hull glass. It is below the two keel bolts that always sit in water.  Whether on the hard, in the water, rain, shine, there is always water sitting there.  It doesn't drain to the bilge properly.  We'll fix that shortly, but for now we need to get the outside done.

 AJ tightened down the keel bolts and sanded the crack in the paint where the keel seam was leaking.  The keel seam was fiberglass taped by a previous owner at some point, and it was cracked when we hauled out, so this appears to have been an ongoing problem.  Running out of time we ground back the area, cleared out the old caulk, flattened the tip on the caulk gun and re-filled the seam with 5200 hoping it will allow for flex until we can drop the keel, inspect the bolts, and rebed the whole mess in the far future.  It will do for now.



I stripped and painted the lockers that house the transducer thru hulls, and batteries.  I was planning on using white but we have a gallon of gray bilge coat, so gray it is. The speed/log transducer is in port side thru hull, depth sounder in the starboard.

We have two portlights left to install.  They were not done with the others because the wood fascia behind them had to be replaced.   We started by epoxying in new solid 3/16" teak fascia head boards on the starboard side above the closet and in the vee berth.  They were the only two sections that were still covered in the original Chinese plywood with teak veneer.  They were badly delaminated and rotten, so we scraped the coachroof insides clean to the polyester rather easily in that area.  The rest of the cabin has already been very nicely done in solid teak boards instead of plywood.  Our local wood guy, Mark, homesteads with his wife, Rose, on their self sustaining farm.  When not harvesting eggs, or slaughtering chickens or pigs, they run M.R. Woods in Stuart, FL. They also harvest absolutely the most amazing orange blossom honey.  He kindly hand-selected some old growth heart wood teak 6" wide lumber from his stock and sawed off thin boards then edge glued them to get the needed 11" height.  This is how the other replacement panels in the cabin were done, but with Mark's panels, the joint is very difficult to find.  Primo work, and only $60 for the fascia and 30 feet of teak trim if you can believe it.  The $ never gets eaten up where you think they will. It's the soft costs that kill you.  Notice that the bulk head splits the window in half.  We rectified this by cutting off the top of the bulkhead both so we could access the rotten fascia and so the window can be installed.   It will be reinforced across the ceiling to the cabinet bulkhead, but more on that when we get to it.  For now the old arrangement must go.

  AJ cut out a crude oval matching the old portlight so we'd have a way to clamp it down while it cured. The fascia boards were surprisingly stiff and remained straight while sitting in the boat for the week of rain, but soaking up the epoxy on one side caused them to want to curl once applied the cabin sides, and the clamps weren't enough.  We had to improvise something to push them back down before the epoxy cured.  We wedged 2 x 4s, paint roller handle extensions, sections of aluminum extrusion, and spare shelves between the cabin sides with plenty of paint stirring sticks to shim it just right.  It was tricky. But worked.

The back corner drain in the cockpit floor still had to be plumbed.  We decided to run it to the large portside drain.  AJ spent a lot of time at plumbing and home improvement stores looking for a piece that we could use to plumb the small aft drain into the massive forward ones that we built a few months ago.  We could have built something out of hundreds of dollars of large bronze fittings: A 2" Tee; 2x 2" threaded hose barbs; a 2"-1" reducer holding a 1"-3/4" reducer, and a 3/4" barb.  Aside from the heavy and expensive chunk of bronze I would have ended up with, it would have had 5 threaded joints, which is to me as good as asking for a leak.  Fiberglass/epoxy is quickly becoming our go-to material, so we decided it would be simpler and better to make our own out of lightweight, leakproof, everlasting fiberglass "T" junction.   We started with a 2" fiberglass exhaust coupling tube, then drilled a hole and inserted flexible poly tubing of the correct diameter.  The correct inside diameter of the drain is the same as the outside diameter of the tubing.  Then just wrap the tubing in wet fiberglass (two wraps of biaxial cloth with chopped strand mat = ~ 1/8" thick), feather the wet fiberglass out onto the 2" tube around the junction, and immediately wrap in masking tape to keep it all compressed and smooth as it cures.  The key here is that epoxy does not stick to masking tape adhesive nor to the poly tubing, so after it cures, all we had to do is peel the masking tape off and grab the poly tube with some pliers and twist until it came out.

Viola: solid cockpit drain tube T junction.  We added some strand thickened epoxy to the joint area afterwards to further reinforce it.  I am beginning to love the simplicity of fiberglass...  still not liking the raw materials involved.

AJ also made the small aft cockpit drain tube this plumbs to in the same manner.

We ran into some problems with the prop.  We had a nice 3 blade prop, but it didn't fit because it had slightly aft raked blades that hit the rudder.  So we put on a 2 blade prop given to us by Lee McGregor, but it hit the rudder too. So we had to cut the shaft just a bit to get it to fit properly.  Plus a two blade prop can be removed without lifting the engine to move the shaft forward first.   It's now on and ready, we're just waiting on the proper spacer for our drivesaver in order to finalize.

We've also installed a lot of the deck hardware, still more to install today.  The bilge pump is installed, And many of the new stanchions are standing proud.  It's been a little of this and a little of that all over the boat each day trying to get ready. Feels like I'm running in circles!

Post on the engine installation and test run coming soon...

Pretty on the Outside, Rotten to the Core

Robin's got new AwlGrip sides in oyster white; so shiny you can see your face in it.  Just enough buttercream richness to allude to its vintage (age? Decrepitness?), while keeping the viewer wondering if it is truly white without another Florida day-glo-white boat for reference.  The original gel coat was a deep cream, but a bit too rich for me.  This is a nice compromise that won't burn your retinas, nor leave the boat looking too dated.

The waterline stripe and the arrow are taped off, ready to be painted black. I'm glad the bottom paint turned out the deep maroon it is instead of the ferrari red that it was.  Sophisticated curves deserve sophisticated colors.

Here I am getting angry at a cutlass bearing.

The brass inner sleeve of the cutlass bearing was well attached to the housing.  This is after cutting out the rubber sleeve.

A fellow boater in the yard came over and lent a hammer driver.  His parting words were, "Best of luck to you, many men have cried trying to replace a cutlass bearing." A Florida instant deluge washing away my tears in the middle of removal.

The bearing never did come out, so the whole housing came off instead, and went to the prop shop for a professional press.  Probably a better idea anyway since it is about to hold and seal the shaft for our new engine and prop. It is difficult to see here, but the Previous owner used thickened epoxy to fair the hull around the cutlass housing.  Pretty in theory, kinda asinine in practice.

The anchor locker after a little paint scraping by Sarah.  I'm not sure if we can get in there to reach the bow without removing the divider panel.

And also not with those on the ceiling. It's unlikely that we could stay low enough to not cut our scalp open on one of 12 screws.  I'll be cutting them off flush after reinstallation.

The panel is painted plywood with fiberglass and epoxy tabs holding it to the ceiling and floor.  We will have to cut the panel out, coat it in epoxy and glass, and put it back in.  We will also seal the exposed core you can see around the rough cut holes for the hawse pipes in the ceiling.  Not sure how long they have been that way, but the nice thing about teak-cored decks as you can see, is that the core is still dry and still fully laminated...  though the cleat backing blocks aren't.

Here I am removing those damn table stands.  The dinette table has been the most painful thing in our lives for the last year.  From its sharp edges causing deep cuts and bruises on our hip and thighs, to the constant knee bashing on the 3" slides under the table, to shin banging on the stands... Even the bolts resulted in enough busted knuckles that I ended up cutting the heads off with a grinder.  The evil has been exercised.

Free at last, with a little help from my favorite "persuader", the 5 pound sledge with a 9" handle.

What lies beneath the boards that have never been removed.

Vinegar and water is the first and primary cleaning solution.  Why waste expensive non-eco-friendly cleaning chems and breathe toxic fumes when there is just so much crap to get loose?

I'm still shocked at which screws are the hardest to get loose.  So far, every underwater threaded fitting has come free with a couple taps followed by steady pressure.  The smaller screws that hold the interior together are proving to be pure evil, as you saw with the table.  The screws holding this floorboard on are still making me scratch my head.  Most of them were varnished over.

Here is more bulkhead de-lamination. This is the de-lamination around a leaky window, split by the bulkhead. It's the same bulkhead Sarah ripped the bottom out of in the closet.

Bulkhead de-lamination is the major reason for the subfloor rebuild.  You don't want to fix the bulkheads if the floor isn't draining away standing water properly.  Soon the floors will be flowing freely to the bilge, and we can cut and glass in new bulkheads around the cabin.  But first we will seal the decks and install new windows so no water is present to make the newly-cleared trip past the bulkheads to the bilge.

As soon as the black striping is done on the topsides, we are going to hit the decks and abandon the demoralizing, filthy, stifling cabin and spend some time in the fresh air.   It's not supposed to rain Sunday through Tuesday, so we are going to start sanding the paint and honeycomb off the decks with 36 grit and vacuum sanders. Then on to hardware removal/re-installation, chain plate removal, patching the deck, wood treatment, and paint.  Then we'll replace the windows.  Once the decks and cabin are fully sealed, we'll head back down below.