August 23, 2010

During the week I worked on stripping the layers of old paint off the second of the two salvaged Wilcox Crittenden bronze ports. As anyone who has stripped paint knows, it's a dirty, messy, nasty job. It took about six cycles of applying the stripper, wire brushing and rinsing to get off all the layers.

Saturday was devoted to visiting an old high school classmate I hadn't seen in more years than I care to admit. It turned out to be a surprisingly upsetting experience to see what had become of what I remembered as pretty, sweet young thing. But that's a different saga altogether.

What remained of my available weekend boat time was spent grinding off the old caulking from the back of the Wilcox Crittenden ports, leak testing them, and disassembling two teak-framed mirrors salvaged from the boat being cut up at Hidden Harbor. To test the ports, I closed them up tightly, set them face down on top of a paper towel, and filled them with water. The paper towel quickly revealed that one of the ports did indeed have a leak around the top part of the permanent seal around the glass. It should be pretty easy to cure with a bit of black silicone, and being at the top, it's unlikely to cause a problem anyway.

The two salvaged mirrors were mounted back-to-back on a sawed out hunk of teak veneer plywood and surrounded by some nice teak trim. To dismount the mirrors I had to carefully drill out the bungs covering the mounting screws on the trim, and then remove the screws. Once I removed both mirrors, the remaining piece of teak ply turned out to be large enough and good enough to be useful. Next week I'll bring one of the trim rings to the boat to see if the mirrors will work in spots I had in mind.