Thursday, July 24th, 2008
I really do have the best luck. All of the rain these past couple of days made the footings under the scafolding kind of well… mushy. Combine that with 1 guy in a hurry who tends to jump from the boat the scafolding and you get… 1 guy who lands on his ass and sprains his ankle really bad after the scafolding collapses.
I tried to ignore it and took a break and then went back to work but it wasn’t happening. Quite quickly I found myself unable to walk on my left foot (it was the right one last year) and had to quit. With a small tear in my eye I hobbled to the car and went home. Fearing a moron bone break I had an x-ray done and thankfully, just a sprain.
Well, I guess I have to take a look at it this way; at least it gives me a chance to blow a ton of money on the parts that I’m missing… *sigh*
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Keeping with the band names theme I give you Slim and the Braces. I rebuilt the engine model (for the last time, I swear) from the technical specs of the M4-30. You can see why I call it Slim.
Originally I had decided to cut out the rear pan under the ladder after I glassed in the middle set of stringers. In usual fashion I took back what I thought and decided to brace everything and cut it out. The brace also makes for a good place to sit and contemplate your woes.
It was raining like crazy today so I rigged up a shop light to the cabin roof. The extra ambient light and the cool weather made for very pleasant working. I also got a chance to use an incredibly old tool to rough up the fiberglass. It looks the the grandfather to the norton stripping brush.
Where it really shined was when I ran it in reverse. Instead of the normal stripping action (which was pretty good) the spring loaded tips would hit almost dead on and bounce back, almost like one of those really expensive pin scalers. Between this and a little help from the beast the bilge was ready for stringers and glass in short order. Tomorrow I’ll buy the wood (good Doug-fir is apparently really good for fiberglass cored construction).
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Ripped out the sole, bought a bunch of crappy lumber from Home Depot to make stringer templates. I think that the Woody template looks good but isn’t exact enough for this sort of work. Looks like I’ll have to make another one with just the bare essentials to get proper alignment. One thing that’s irking me is that I don’t have all of my parts to do this job. I don’t know why I thought I didn’t need to have things like engine mounts or fuel filter to do the install.
While ripping out the sole I noticed a bit of popped glass tape by the mast step and decided to investigate. Off came a thing strip of glass and out came 6 sopping wet pieces of teak that make up the “breast hook” of the mast step (I might have that technically wrong…).
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Monday, July 21st, 2008
If I’m going to do this engine install I’m going to need a better engine mockup than my 10 minute cardboard and tape job. The ideal would to have arms “Ahnald” back in his pumping iron days and just use the 270 lb M4-30 as a template, but this is a rational world we live in (politics non withstanding of course) this just won’t work. So I built Woody as a scale wooden replica of the engine.
Friday, July 18th, 2008
So with the toe rail plinth pretty much done, the tiller bumper roughed out, and the cabin sole in shambles, the starboard side sort of faired, the hull to deck joint needed its finishing round over and the aft scroll work needing its fairing, I came to the start realization that I was at the cross roads of a hundred tiny projects that are keeping me all over the place. The result is the feeling that I’m not getting anything done that’s really substantial. All to often I find myself mixing a tiny batch of fairing compound when I KNOW that the entire deck could use a coat or two. To compound my frustration I had this sudden urge to pry off all of my deadlights to see just how new portlights would look. An hour later with my head out the now empty deadlight I said “ok, time to change process”.
Luckily this coincided with lunch time so I grabbed a sandwich, a nice big sharpie, and the plywood portlight blanks I had cut out and drew out my plan of attack.
I drew everything up and then decided that 2 weeks per project, only that project would be a good pace. The breakdown is as follows:
- engine install and cabin sole
- sanding deck, patching holes, putting in portlights
- toerail install, sanding hull, sanding new deck joint
- bowsprit
8 weeks of work but it gets me into September ready for priming/painting and cabinet building for the winter. An aggressive schedule for sure, but I like it that way.
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
To get better idea of what I’m dealing with in terms of putting in the engine I took the old nasty water tank out today.
It really is kind of amazing how much space this liner construction wastes not to mention how hard it makes it to reach anything without major demolition work. Also notice the mold in the fresh water tank! mmmmmm tasty.
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
Mold on,
Mold off,
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
After working on the aft section, fairing up the remaining patches on the starboard side, and adding the second stage of toe rail goop (pretty much just colloidal silica with some milled fiber thrown in for shatter resistance) I decided to take care of one of my biggest peeves about the T30, the tiller. Actually it’s not specifically the tiller but the area that the tiller connects at. It seems that no matter how expensive the T30, no matter how well maintained it is, this area always looks like it was smashed with a… well… tiller!
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Monday, July 14th, 2008
One thing that Tartan did that was really, really smart on the T30 was putting a built up ‘glass plinth under things that were through bolted. This had the effect of making a little island above the deck when there was water on it. As a result the toe rail rarely leaked from passive moisture like rain (driving rain and spray may have been a different story though). I think its a good design and it’s only failing is that it wasn’t continued everywhere on the boat; the bow pulpit and the aft pulpit are a mess of star cracks, stained (wet) gel coat, and only locally wet core (thankfully). So step on with the toe rail is to rebuild the shattered plinth that I cut away a year ago.
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Saturday, July 12th, 2008
Jack has really been pushing his idea of flying an asymetrical spinnaker off of the new anchoring sprit. I did the research and found a really decently priced asym furler from CDI but I wasn’t sure about the geometry. So as usual I played.
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