November 29, 2010

As planned, I spent a most enjoyable long holiday weekend with Carol. Because the office was closed Wednesday, however, I was able to squeeze in half a day on Circadian. I installed the refinished table and the new cover for the mast support post. It all went pretty well, although some clamping pressure was required to squeeze everything into alignment. Of course I also had to do a bit of grinding, this time on the top of the post cover to fit it around a ring on the ceiling moulding. (Nothing fits the first time on a boat.) The final result, though, was a very snug fit: absolutely no movement or rattles when you jerk on the new attached grab handle.

As you can see in the photos, I still need to insert bungs to cover the screw holes on one side. That presents a bit of a challenge because normally the bungs are trimmed and finished with the rest of the piece. I can't do that in this case without having to refinish the whole thing, which of course I don't want to do. I plan to pre-finish a thin strip of jatoba from which I will cut the bungs. Hopefully I'll be able to insert and glue the thin, pre-finished bungs so they are flush with the surface. We'll see....

I also tried out my new screw extractors on the broken-off old bronze screws that secure the teak hatch hinges. They worked great. Very cleverly, the saw teeth are designed to cut counter-clockwise, so it encourages the screw remnants to come right out as you make the surrounding circular cut.I glued dowel pieces (which didn't need to match since they will be covered by the hinge) into the resulting holes and then trimmed them flush with a chisel. You can see in the photo that it's not as clean as what the flush-cut saw would have done, but I couldn't use the flush-cut saw because of the recess for mounting the hinge flush with the wood surface. Again, it won't be visible, so as long as it's a strong joint, it doesn't need to be elegant.The old generator is still sitting in cockpit waiting for a break in the weather so it can be removed. The prospects for the coming weekend don't look good at the moment, with yet another storm moving in later in the week. Looks like I won't be able to tackle the next port installation for a while either. Ah well, there's always something that can be done!

November 21, 2010

I have two excuses for not getting much done this week: it's been raining and windy, and Carol is coming up for Thanksgiving, so a lot of time has been spent housecleaning. I did manage to pick up a few things I needed: a piece of polished stainless sheet to shield the teak bulkhead from the heat of the stove that has a burner that is too close to it, and the screw extractor that will hopefully allow me to recover from the calamity of broken screws compounded by a broken drill bit. The good news: this post will be blessedly short!

The only Circadian work accomplished this week was to finish rubbing out the polyurethane finish on the new jatoba wood cover for the ugly painted iron mast support post in the middle of the saloon. It's now ready to be installed. You can see in the photo that jatoba is a pretty good match for teak. The grab handle is teak; the rest is jatoba. (No staining or Photoshop tricks on the woods.) It's only partially assembled, since it has to be disassembled and then re-assembled around the post. If you have really sharp eyes, you might be able to detect the tiny light gray spots that are the bung holes for the screws. They are gray because because they have residual rottenstone powder in them and the bungs haven't been inserted yet.

Happy Thanksgiving all!

November 1, 2010

My accomplishments for my week of boat work went almost as planned (about as good as it gets). I picked up the heavy glass mat and epoxy resin on Monday, and returned to the boat on Tuesday. It took another 16 (!) layers of mat to fill the two old port holes (pun intended). On Wednesday I ground the new glass close to flat and flush, using a straight edge to find and mark the high spots. I got to wear my new Wes Cravens designed grinding outfit, hoping to mostly avoid the infamous fiberglass itch.Next followed three cycles of filling the low spots with Microlite putty and fairing it flush and flat with the manual sanding board (torture board). A foot-wide $3 plastic smoothing tool was a great help in applying the putty flat and smooth across the entire area.

The rain predicted for Thursday was delayed, so I was able cut out the holes for the new ports using my big hole saw and new jig saw. As anyone who's done it will tell you, cutting big holes in your boat, even above the waterline, is always traumatic. "Measure twice, cut once" was a mantra I repeated over and over. Careful use of drilling and cutting guides helped it go smoothly. Cut-outs showed that my laminations were good: no gaps, all the mat layers fully saturated with resin A little grinding to round the inner edges and the ports slid into the new holes perfectly. Whew!! I coated the newly-exposed edges of the plywood interior liner with epoxy so it wouldn't absorb water and rot in the event of (Heaven forbid!) a leak. While I waited for the epoxy to cure, I cut and applied butyl tape to a porthole flange. In addition to the flat cut pieces of butyl around the outer flange, I added a strip around the corner where the inner and outer flanges meet at a 90 degree angle. The theory was that it would squeeze out between the inner flange and the edge of the hole, resulting in a good seal.

The epoxy around the hole on the sunny side cured quickly enough for me to try to bolt in the port. I soon discovered that my newly-purchased bronze machine screws were too short to extend through both the uncompressed butyl and the mounting flange. Damn! After a few moments of high anxiety, I thought I might be able to use a couple of clamps to compress the butyl enough to get the screws through. By repeatedly clamping and reclamping around the perimeter and using a lot of clamping pressure, it worked like a charm. The individual butyl pieces welded to each other nicely, and the excess squeezed out between the flange and the hole as I had hoped. Of course some also sqeezed out around the inside mounting flange on the cabin side, but that was easily removed simply by cutting around the flange with sharp knife and lifting off the excess. At this point, the epoxy around the hole on the shady side still wasn't cured, it was getting late, the rain was coming in, and I was beat-all good reasons to call it a day and head home.

It rained Friday and Saturday, so I continued with the shop projects. I rounded the corners on the mast support post cover, cut matching bungs from scrap jatoba and glued them in place on one side. On the other side (the piece that will be screwed on during installation) I mounted a teak grab handle. No, I didn't make it. At twelve bucks (even at Worst Marine), it wasn't worth the time. The next morning, after the glue had set, I trimmed the protruding bungs flat using a flushcut saw. I find it works better than using the usual chisel method. Even with a sharp chisel and thin cuts, I usually end up with some of the bungs breaking off below the surface. The flushcut saw doesn't scratch the surface and results in the bung trimmed so close to the surface that normal finish sanding is enough to make it perfect. Finally, finish sanding of the post cover pieces, and between-coats sanding of the varnish on the table parts. Last thing Saturday was to apply varnish all around.

Sunday was a beautiful day. I installed the second port as I had the first and applied a bead of 3M 4000 UV around the ports to finish off the installaton and create a redundent outer seal. With some white plastic caps to cover the protruding nuts and bolts, it will be a pretty clean installation. I cleaned up the week's mess (well, mostly), and called it a good week.

October 25, 2010

The first big storm of the season hit this weekend, so I had to focus on shop jobs this week. No problem: I've got plenty of 'em. I continued to apply coats of varnish and Cetol to the teak hatches and various saloon table parts. I sprayed a light coat of varnish on the underside of the main part of the table because it shows when the table is folded up against the mast post. I had to be careful to mask off the slide out supports for the fold-out extensions because they fit so snugly that they would jam if varnished. I used aluminum foil for most of the masking. It's a trick I learned by watching how the pros masked all the hardware in preparation for spraying a deck. It's much faster than tape.
My big hole saw arrived, so I used it to do a test run on the cutouts for the Ta Chiao ports. It worked well. I also did a test cutout for the ABI ports, which was much more challenging because the top and bottom lips slope down. I used an adjustable angle gauge to capture and reproduce the correct angle. I made a paper pattern to mark the centers for holes for the circular corner holes, which of course were different diameters on top and bottom. They had to be cut at an angle in one direction, perpendicular in another. I thought I might be able to do it by putting the hole saw in my Portalign tool, but the hole saws were too big. I used the Portalign to drill the pilot holes for the hole saws, which turned out to be adequate. I connected the holes with straight cuts using my nice new Bosch jig saw. The top and bottom cuts had to be cut at an angle, of course. A piece of old scrap served as a straight edge to guide the cut.
The results, while not perfect, were close enough to show that the method should work.


Next, I fabricated a long wooden tube or box to cover the welded iron mast support post in the saloon. This post also supports the saloon table.

First I sawed up a big board of jatoba, a Brazilian hardwood that can look a lot like teak, but costs about one fourth as much. It is often erroneously referred to as "Brazilian Cherry" when made into furniture or flooring. It is not a species of cherry. While it lacks the natural weather resistance and durability of teak, that doesn't matter for this application inside the cabin.
During assembly, I had to straighten out the resulting boards a bit, using assorted clamps as shown in the photos. I still need to round off the corners with the router, cut bungs and plug the screw holes (at least on one side). I'll probably also put some varnish on it before I remove one side and reassemble it around the post on the boat at some future date.

I decided to take the week off to try to make some more progress on the boat, but the weather hasn't been helping. Today it cleared off and was a pleasant day, so I went to the boat and started on the major job of installing the Ta Chiao ports in the v berth (one of the patched-over old portholes leaks). In addition, it had been raining for 48 hours more or less continuously, so it had been a pretty good test for the newly overhauled and resealed forward hatch and doghouse skylight and I wanted to see how they held up. No leaks! Joy!!!

The bulk of the day was spent grinding off the giant sealant mess from where the original ports had been, beveling the edge of the 'glass cabin side to bed the new glass needed to fill the gap created by installing a smaller port, and laying in the first four layers of glass/epoxy.
When I realized how many more layers of the lightweight glass cloth I would have to lay in to build the required thickness, I left early to stop at TAP Plastics to pick up some heavy mat and more resin. I hope to finish building up the layers of 'glass tomorrow. Wednesday I should be able to grind the glass down and fill with microballoons in preparation for fairing. Thursday would have been a grind: manually fairing the filled glass to get it straight, flush and smooth using a small version of what I've heard called a "torture board." It looks like I'll get a weather reprieve, though. Rain is predicted for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I may not get the new ports installed, but at least it won't leak!