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The never ending jobs list…
By Duncan | July 8, 2008
It’s been a while since the last update, however we have been busy. As this project continues I am coming to truly understand why boats are alway referred to as women, for she is demanding all my time and money, requires constant attention and TLC and repays this all with an ever growing list of jobs….Though I do muse on the more esoteric aspects of boat ownership, perhaps it is time to focus on the reality and daily grind of tasks accomplished. Our focus of late has been on getting the boat ready to put into the water (hopefully she’ll float).:
Hull
We have had a great time scrubbing, filliing, smoothing, cleaning and finally antifouling the boat. I was quite amazed at how lovely antifoul is, and treated myself to a particularly pleasant shower in white spirits after finishing..I still even have some on my leg which I can’t get off. We still haven’t quite figured out how to paint the areas under the cradle and at the bottom of the keel, but plans are basically to talk nicely to the crane driver when putting her back in the water with bribes involving extended team breaks.
We opted for black antifoul in the end, based on ordering white antifoul and then deciding returning it would be too much and managing to convince ourselves it would look better in black. It has all worked out quite nicely, as it does give a certain edge to the underwater profile (not that anyone will see it). The downside is the waterline might be a little odd, we raised it a bit as we expect to add a little extra weight with provisions, but had to guess at how she would sit in the water….we’ll find out soon enough how we did on that…
We had found a little hole in the hull (don’t worry it was very small) just ahead of the rudder, looking at the other boats, this looked to have had a small kelp cutter blade housed within it. A quick trip to sainsburys for a quality stainless steel knife and some expert filing work and we had a blade. 20 minutes of playing with some filler, glass fibre and epoxy and this was securely fitted into the hull. Any takers for a pool on whether this will still be there when we get to Sydney?
Rig
Rigging - Our standing rigging has now been completely replaced, and while this is reassuring and as the (rod) rigging was 9 years old, I am confident this was the right option, however all I can say (or rather my wallet) is ouch right now…The legend that is Mark (AKA Sparky) has picked this up from the riggers, and so we wait expectantly for some shiny rigging that will undoubtedly look very similar to the stuff we sent there a few weeks ago when we were several thousand pounds richer.
Now all we need to do is connect up all the rigging, attach all the fittings, mount the new rigging (sorry if “mount” is the wrong technical term, my yachting vocabulary was taught to me by my father and is thus resticted to loud expletives issued from the helm), and run all the running rigging through the new mast. Oh and finally put all this onto the boat.
Mast
Oddly enough we found a spare Sydney 40 mast - new and unused that had been lying around for a few years. This mast was the spare for the 1999 Admiral’s Cup fleet (irrelevant but possibly interesting fact).
We have since bought the mast, and beefed up the mast track at the reefing points (apparently the track can pop out occasionally at these points as a result of head boards in the mainsails). We decided the best way to do this was to stuff the track with blu tack to stop epoxy getting in and blocking it (there is some special putty stuff you can use we were told, however Co-op didn’t have any in stock) and then wrapped some Carbon fibre over the top. This obviously then gave the slight issue that we had blocked the mast track rather effectively in 2 places.
Once the epoxy had gone off, the task of cutting the mast track out started.
A couple of failed attempts with a penknife and a hacksaw soon led us to to the conclusion proper tools were required, so after a quick trip to B&Q the own brand budget Dremel tool was bought and we were underway.
8 little grinding discs later and we had the first track cut-out, possible one of the more stressful of jobs - working on a carbon mast, in the track with a power tool gives far too much potential for major screw ups to be entirely comfortable. The other pleasant outcome of this job was that I managed to cover my face will little bits of blue-tack that the grinding blades threw out as they went through the carbon into the blu-tack. This was strangely hard to remove, and remained with me through the next day, which was nice.
Once this is all done, we just need to paint the mast. We decided to go for white to keep it cool in the tropics, but will be leaving the mast below deck so we can prove to any doubters that it really is Carbon.
Miscellaneous
Apart from the fun and games with the rig and hull, we have also fiddled with the Engine a bit, removing and cleaning out the fuel system, and taken out the water system ready for new tanks and plumbing.
We were planning on replacing the methylated spirits cooker with a butane/propane installation, however the thought occurred that perhaps we ought to test the spirit burners. Some testing showed that it boiled a pint of water in 6 minutes, marginally quicker that a small domestic gas burner, so we have decided to fix up the existing cooker and use that, saving ourselves a pretty penny, as well as being the simpler and safer option.
We have also taken out and cleaned the pipe cot fabric. Alex kindly voluteered to test these, and after an aborted first attempt:
We’re also steadily accumulating bits and bobs that are waiting to be fitted, and have taken out some of the floor boards which Ewan’s parents have very kindly started work on.
So whilst we’ve managed to get through lots of jobs, the list still seems to be growing faster than we can knock them down, but the good news is that the jobs are becoming smaller and more specific, more like ‘fit new VHF’ and less like ‘Sort standing rigging’!
Topics: Boat Preparation |