Sunday, August 28, 2016

Boat on trailer

Yay, boat is now on the trailer for good:

And:


My son-in-law Erik helped me again, this time things went very smooth and I think we had it dropped on the trailer in about 15 minutes or so.     Got the side-bunks (roughly) adjusted and then moved the trailer back in the tent.    Tent is not long enough anymore, the trailer tongue sticks out slightly so I can't fully close the front tent flap.   Guess I need to figure out long-term storage (fallback is to just leave the poor thing outside all of the time... :).    There are lots of little things left to do on the trailer: mount tie-down points, re-locate and mount winch-platform, etc.    Still, I am getting closer now to starting beam attachment work!

Tiller is a work-in-progress:


The tiller has three layers of glass uni on top and bottom, and one layer of glass uni on the sides, all (going to be) covered with carbon fiber.   I had thought I'd have plenty of slop on the portion that fits inside the tiller bracket, but it is already a tight squeeze fit - guess I shouldn't spend much time painting that part.   Good news is that the incomplete section above feels very light-weight as I hold it.   I also spent some time today gluing together a blank for the next section (mostly will be a straight piece).  

My Farrier-supplied rudder case has one small problem:   the hole in the tiller bracket blocks removal of the rudder pin from above.  No big deal, I plan to elongate the hole until it does work.  Just surprised that a factory-supplied part wasn't 100% perfect.

I finally - after about six or seven years - took the beams out of their shipping crate.   The packing tape had gotten very hard in multiple places on each beam, so I had to use De-Solv-It to (slowly) get it all off.  After that, each beam got a nice soapy wash...


...followed by a degreaser treatment.  I tried to be diligent during the cleaning process - don't want any adhesion issues due to the gelcoat or missed wax areas.   After that I sanded all four beams down to 150 grit (felt almost criminal having to ruin that nice gelcoat finish) and applied primer.  This is the first coat (looks blotchy because I'm brushing it on, second coat always looks more even):


I've never done any thread tapping before, so I spent time reading up on that process and have also ordered myself a combined SAE\metric tap and die set.   Will need this for mounting the wingnet support eyes in the sides of the beams.   

I mounted the bow bulkhead cover:


I am to going to get neoprene or similar foam-based compressible tape, to put under the flange of that cover to make it weather-tight.

The rudder compartment covers also got installed; I won't weather-strip these of course:


I made over-sized, epoxy-filled screw holes for each of these compartment covers.  It's not a make-or-break issue but I just wanted to try to do it right.   You can see in the foreground above my big blue anti-skid section on the deck of the boat.  Yeah it's kinda dirty right now.

Here is an inside shot of the windows and the storage compartment covers...


...just because I think it turned out nice looking.  Oh yes, I might be able to reduce bolt length from 1 1/2" to 1 1/4" - but not right now.   Anyway, more later.

No comments: