Can the sun come out soon?

The terrible weather has continued here in New England, so I have been cooped up in the workshop trying to get as much done as possible. I think I might be starting to have cabin fever from working down there so much, but the bits of the boat that are in there are starting to look really good.

Right now the mast, boom, spreaders and flagstaff are all hanging from the rafters for varnish, the companionway boards, handrails and tracks for the main hatch are on the table being varnished, while the two hatches are having paint work on their undersides while one also has some varnish work done. The mast and boom are up to six coats of varnish, while the other pieces are still at 5. The ice box lid is getting painted, as is the counter from the head, while the electrical panel continues to get worked on too. I feel like I spend half of everyday just trying to move stuff around so that it all fits into my garage - I think that what I am looking forward to most of getting the boat in the water is just getting everything out of my garage...

An overview of everything:

The mast:

Main hatch:

I'm hoping that when the weather clears up later this week I can start working at the boatyard again. On the boat, I still need to varnish the toerails and cockpit coamings, paint the covestripe, apply bottom paint and if time permits, adjust the boottop. Also, I would like to get the name on the transom, but that is not exactly a high priority item at the moment. There is also a bevy of smaller interior projects, but they also aren't anything that will stop me from having the boat launched.

P.S. Sorry about the picture quality - I'm missing the cord for my regular camera, so I'm just using my phone's camera - which doesn't take quite as good close up pictures.

Sprucing Things Up

I took advantage of the two sunny days we had this week to get a lot of sanding done on the boat. The toerails and cockpit coamings were completed, as was the mast. While this took much longer than I had anticipated, I was pleased to have it done, even if the wood still didn't look as good as I would like. After being neglected for so long, the coamings will probably never look perfect again, but I figured that making them smooth and then glossy will help hide how degraded the wood had become. The toerails were replaced at some point, but the bit at the bow was not, resulting in the color difference noted below - not a huge deal, and hopefully it will be less apparent when it is all varnished.
The cockpit looks good, but the wood is substantially darker than I would prefer. Thankfully the paint still looks good, which should help brighten the area up a bit.

After spending two days sanding, I was happy to get 1 coat of varnish on before we get rain for another week. This coat was heavily thinned and should do a good job of sealing the wood - as I applied it, the wood was really soaking it up, which also made it look darker and uneven.

The mast also received significant attention. Early on Wednesday morning I applied the first coat of varnish, thinned 50%, and let it dry while I attended to the toerails and coamings. Later in the day, I applied a second coat, this time thinned 25%. Both of these went on very smoothly, and the wood was really soaking it up.

The mast was already looking much better, and I was pleased that all the preparation was paying off. But, as I mentioned earlier, the forecast for the next ten days includes 9 days of rain. If I waited for the sun to come back out, the boat would never really be ready for the water, so I knew that I had to find somewhere indoors to varnish over the next week...

While the mast would fit in the living room, that idea was quickly denied. So I had to get pretty creative with fitting the mast in the house. I have a great workshop and garage under our house, but its only 20 feet long, and the mast is 26 feet. It also needed to be accessible so that I could varnish it, and I need to varnish a lot of other boat pieces so it couldn't block off the shop.

Ultimately, I ended up clearing out the crawl space at the garage, and building a track that runs up under the house. There's only about 2 feet of headroom in this area, but by allowing the mast to slide out, I can apply varnish to the top 6 feet (while the bottom 6 feet of the mast sticks out into the street) and then roll it back in and deal with the rest of the mast. Not the best scenario, but I applied the 3rd coat of varnish this afternoon, and it worked really well. The point where I stopped momentarily to move the mast wasn't visible, and if it becomes a problem down the road, this will be 20' above deck and I doubt it will be too noticeable.

Here is the top of the mast out...

While the bottom of the mast sticks out the garage and rests on my car...

And then after rolling the mast back into the crawlspace...

Given that the house was built in 1780 on top of ledge, building the track was one of the more uncomfortable and dirty experiences of late, but I think its pretty cool and I was really excited when it actually worked. It was also pretty cool to see the structure of the house up close - the original floor joists are massive, and a couple of them still had bark on the underside - definitely not the type of stuff you find in new houses.

Hopefully, this whole set up will let me get a coat of varnish on everyday for the next week, which will help keep the whole project on schedule.

Slow Progress

In the last week, I have been cautiously dodging the weather in an effort to get some work done on the boat. Rain has been in the forecast for almost every day in the last week, and other than the next two days, it looks like more rain is on its way. As a result, progress hasn't been dramatic, but I have managed to get a number of smaller tasks done. Back at home, I continued working on the electrical plan. I completed and test fit the new housing, and while it isn't pretty yet, I think it is going to work really well. I decided that it wasn't worth even trying to match the original mahogany, so the frame is just going to be white to match the counter top, and the face probably will be too, unless I find some nice veneer that matches the boat. While it looks pretty simple, I actually made it so that the face of the panel is actually square and then the frame is made to match the angles of the space it is in. The top piece actually meets the slight curve of the shelf above it, which took much longer to create than I anticipated.

Aside from that, I worked on sanding all the pieces of the companionway, as well as priming the undersides of the companionway hatches and the counter top pieces that were at home. The rain really did hold back some of the more important projects I need to get done.

Friday gave me my best weather window to begin tackling one of my more dreaded projects, which is refinishing the mast. When I went to the Marblehead Trading Company to pick up the mast, there was coincidentally another wooden mast right next to it which also belonged to a boat named Adagio. Small world, I guess. That mast was in much better shape...

One of the more dreadful parts of the move was getting the mast through downtown Marblehead, and was made all the worse that I ended up on the road right as school got out for the weekend, which made for more traffic than usual. Ended up pretty uneventful, and I was relieved that the mast made it in one piece.
After waiting for a ten minute downpour to pass, I was able to begin inspecting the mast, and then disassembling it. Thankfully, the standing rigging is all relatively recent, though the majority of the running rigging needs some attention/replacement. It also became apparent that the top two feet of the mast were replaced sometime recently, and thankfully it looks like a really nice job was done. The only downside was that they didn't refinish the entire mast at that time, and it looks like they only put a couple of coats of varnish on, which had worn thin in a number of places. The spreaders are almost new, but need to be refinished as well - not nearly enough coats of varnish on the top sides. Everything was put way very neatly last fall:

I had hoped that I wouldn't have to completely strip all the hardware off the mast, but it became pretty clear that the varnish had been on there forever, and was in pretty rough shape in a number of spots. As a result, everything, except the masthead sheave and halyard winch at the base, was removed and carefully labeled for reassembly.

Where the spreaders attach to the mast was in the worst cosmetic shape, but structurally seems to be in great shape still.

After removing all the hardware, I was able to start stripping all the varnish off. It was so thick in most places that it actually came off pretty easily in big sheets with a heat gun. It still took me late into Friday night to get the first half done, and then was finished up Saturday afternoon.
After stripping all the varnish, I began sanding and progress has been pretty quick. Tomorrow I am hoping to finish sanding the mast as well as the toerails and cockpit comings on the boat and ideally apply the first coat of varnish in the afternoon.

The one thing that I see as a major obstacle to getting the boat in the water at this point is getting enough coats of varnish on the mast given the forecast in the next week or so. If I don't get enough coats of varnish on the toerails and coamings that won't stop me from putting the boat in the water, but if I don't get enough coats of varnish on the mast, that's something that can't be touched up with the boat in the water. Looks like the mast might have to be making a visit to our living room...

Work Begins Again

After a successful trip out west (The Eagles are once again Team Racing National Champions), I returned to the boatyard to begin getting the boat ready for the summer. This year, the list of projects doesn't seem nearly as daunting, but there still is a lot that needs to get done. Unfortunately, I haven't been too successful yet at prioritizing the things that must get done before the boat can get launched, but so it goes.

After taking the cover off, I began assessing how everything looked after the winter, and then dove right into working on some projects. One of the biggest tasks this year will be installing a new electrical system, as the one that existed was suspect, to say the least. The system appeared to be a couple of generations of wires cobbled together into a circuit breaker that was stuck to the inside of the cockpit well with some adhesive. Not only was it hard to access, the wires were strewn every which way, with no real color coding (some white, some blue, some yellow, some red, some black, some gray, all randomly connected to each other), no fuses, no battery switch, and then a battery that was just on the cabin sole, with no box. In some places wire had butt connectors, while in other places they had just wrapped the wires in electrical tape, so it was pretty apparent that it all needed to go.

This is what the inside of the DC "panel" looked like once I got it opened.
I spent a fair amount of time considering what I wanted in the new electrical system. I wanted it to be simple, with running lights, mast light, cabin lights, an electric bilge pump, VHF radio, stereo, and a 12V cigarette lighter (I would be useless I my Blackberry died). Just a single battery, and eventually a solar charger, but for now would probably just charge the battery at home and hope it lasted for however long I was on the boat for.

My original idea was to create to panels angled on either side of the companionway, where one would house the DC Panel, the 12V outlet and the bilge pump switch and the other side would have the flush mounted VHF and stereo. This would put them within easy reach of the cockpit, but also accessible when down in the cabin. I fitted some templates to get a sense of how it would look, but ultimately decided that this probably wouldn't be the ideal spot. Not only did I think that they cut off access to the quarter berths, but I also worried about the waterproof-ness of the companionway.

I quickly amended my plan, and decided that the area above the head would do a good job as well, and would also reduce the wiring runs needed for the installation.

The DC panel can go on the left side, the bilge pump switch, outlet and maybe a voltmeter can go in the middle, and then the VHF and stereo can be flush mounted to the right side of the panel. There is also plenty of room in this area for all the wiring to be more or less self contained, and the self above the area will also leave room to mount more electronics down the road.

Instead of the battery just resting on the sole, I have decided to build a new shelf further aft in the boat, under the cockpit sole. This area is out of the way but still accessible, and with the battery here, the wiring can run under the adjacent berth and up to the DC panel, with a battery switch mounted on the face of the berth. I think it will be a pretty slick installation, and it still leaves access into the bilge too.

With that more or less laid out, I turned my attention to a bevy of less important details. Since the forecast for the next 4 days is rain, I didn't anticipate being able to varnish anything on the boat, so I haven't begun sanding the exterior woodwork yet. I did attempt to remove some of it to bring home to work on, and discovered the sealant I used last summer was much more resilient than I anticipated. I only removed the 2 companionway slides, but one of them came off in four pieces. Yikes.

After that fiasco, I turned my attention to some minute work down below, which made me feel a little more successful, even if they are more or less unnoticeable. I prepped the mast step interior pole for fresh paint, stripped the galley and head counter tops, removed some lingering old varnish, and did some general spring cleaning. This didn't bring me any closer to launching, but allowed me to end on a more positive note.

While the boat probably looks worse now without the companionway, I needed to bring the sliders home to fix the brass tracks - the screw holes need to be filled so that the screw heads won't pop out and catch on the hatch all the time. And the underside of the hatches are in need of some serious attention. This should get sorted out in the next couple days while it rains. Hopefully.