Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Almost done up forward

This weekend made for some visual progress despite not getting in the long hours I’m used to. I dog sat a bit on Saturday and my daughter Lilli was in town Sunday, she was in town on a whaling expedition (sight seeing).

I started by putting up the cork I had templated and cut a week ago. I used the Super77 to hold them in place. Again I’ll say the Super90 is by far a much better product for this. The 77 held long enough to get the cover panels in, but when I remove them to install the deck hardware I expect the cork will be loose. I’ll plan to have some Super90 on hand when I tackle that job. Once the cork was up, I re-installed the overhead panels. They are now all up, painted and looking good. The joints will be trimmed out with mahogany, but I’m waiting on that until I know just how much stock I’ll need and buy it all at once and spend a day and mill it down.

On a side note I picked up a router table top off Craigslist last night. It’s just the table top so I can store it easily, but I figure I can make a base that sit across the cockpit coamings and have a make shift workshop out there.

I spent a bit of time sanding the bulkheads and trim in the forward cabin that I had stripped last week too. I’ll get the 1st coat of varnish on them tonight. I figure they’ll need 4 coats or so. Before grandpa past he gave me an assortment of power sanders. With all the odd corners and hard to reach areas they sure are coming in handy.




I also did the last of the painting up forward. I taped off the newly sanded wood and painted the mattress area as well as the face of the v berth. Here there was one small cabinet door that was pretty small. It was on the starboard wall below the berth. The area behind it is huge so I’m planning on opening this up and putting in 3-4 drawers. This will substantially increase my storage for clothes and such. Here is a picture of what it will eventually look like.

Lastly I bought a sheet of mahogany ply and made the new forward chain locker bulkhead using the old one as a template. I epoxied the back and edges with West Systems 2 part epoxy. This should help it hold up far better than the stock one did. The face will get a couple coats of varnish at the same time the rest of the forward cabin does. The trim that went around it had already split and will just need to be re-milled and replaced.

That last bit of news to report is the wasp problem. When we went to get the boat ready for shipping, there were quit a few wasps that had called the trap home. We didn’t see any sort of nest, just a bunch of hibernating wasps.

We’ll, their not hibernating any more. I’ve killed off 20 or so this weekend alone. My scraper for removing the varnish has become my new instrument of death. I’ve gotten so good at killing, I’m able to swat ‘em mid air. I might need to get one of those bug bombs. It’ll be a lot less toxic to do that now vs later. I’ll be damned if I can find any sort of nest. The boats been stripped so I have no idea where they’re coming from. But they keep coming and I keep killing.















During the week I've been riding my bike down to the yard. I got caught with the bridge up. It was a beautiful day, I thought I'd share a picture of the yard.

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