Tag Archives: Boat refit

Aft Cabin Re-Model: Making Patterns

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We’re making progress on that aft cabin.  I spent a great deal of time making a template out of heavy cardboard and playing with all the different combinations that would make the sleeping space larger without using up too much floor space.  We finally settled on expanding the port side and the middle, and leaving the starboard side as it is. Decision made, I set about making a template for Mike to cut a piece of wood to fit in the space we’re enlarging.

Red magic marker defines the shape.

To make the pattern for the piece, I took a marker and ran it along the edge of the existing berth from underneath the cardboard, marking the shape on the cardboard. Then I flopped the cardboard over and, using heavy brown paper from a couple of grocery bags, I was able to fold and cut until I got the right size and shape.

Paper pattern

Naturally, because we don’t want to waste furniture grade plywood, we wanted to cut it from something cheap first to check fit and fine tune the whole thing. Mike bought some cheap, thin plywood and cut the pattern piece at home, then we went down to the marina to see if it would fit. On the way we took a little detour to the other side of the water way to see this:

It's the Saucy Sue! She lives down Foss Waterway from us.

It’s the Saucy Sue! She lives down Foss Waterway from us.

The is the sweet boat formerly known as Saucy Sue. She was our first sailboat and we truly enjoyed her. We felt so nostalgic seeing this little boat who taught us to love sailing so much. She was a lot of fun, easy to sail, and encouraged us to go further and longer. Some of our most ‘exciting’ times were aboard the Sue. We’d love to meet her new owners. She is called Finn du Monde now, which is the name she was given by the woman we sold her to 8 years ago. I love it that she is so close by, still sailing Commencement Bay.

Back at Galapagos after our detour we tried the piece on for size. With only a minor correction here and there, it was good to go. 

Turned out Mike had cut one side a little short, likely because my pattern got folded back or something, but that was fine as we needed to eyeball that corner on the port side and decide how to do it anyhow. That could be a thigh killer if it isn’t done right.  After a little discussion, I cut a piece of cardboard to fit, and we measured, trimmed again, and taped in place.

When we install the final piece of 3/4″ plywood, that  corner will be trimmed off so there are no sharp areas to create bruises. If you are a sailor, you know what I mean.

With the aft cabin cleaned up and the pattern in place, I wanted a visual of how this space might look when finished so I threw a blanket on it and we tried it out. We think this is going to be great and that we’ll be quite happy with it.

Read the next episode here.

 

 

Ready, Set….No.

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Okay, okay, yes, everyone in the Little Cunning Plan household needed to just calm down; get a little reality check, untwist our collective knickers. And we’ve done just that. Wiser minds have prevailed and I hope ours are among them. After our last post where I ranted about how pissed off I was that the hatches leaked, and threatened to use butyl tape to re-bed them in the cold season, our readers raced to our rescue and gave us a good talking to. We love our readers.  And we love how they bring good ideas to the table. Because I can come up with some really bad ideas when I’m mad. 

One of the comments that made us take a deep breath was this reminder by a reader known by the sobriquet of “Saffy the Pook”. Got to love that. He/She put in writing what we had been talking about, only reading it in someone else’s words planted our feet even more firmly on beloved terra firma:

“Like your exhaust, this is not a job that will tolerate shortcuts or amateur mistakes. Also like your exhaust, it can have serious negative repercussions if it fails at sea under trying conditions. As painful as it may be, commit to doing it right whether that means spending the time to do it yourself or spending the money to have a pro do it for you.”  (Saffy the Pook)

Of course, that is 100% accurate. You’ll get no argument from us, Saffy.  And you express this with such a reasonable tone, too.  When I say this kind of thing, it comes out more like, “WE CAN’T GO TO SEA WITH A *&^$^&* LEAKING HATCH! WHAT IF A BIG WAVE COMES? WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO DO THIS OVER? MY HANDS ARE STILL RECOVERING FROM ALL THE **&^ CLEANING WE DID LAST TIME! I STILL HAVEN’T REPLACED ALL THE BRAIN CELLS I LOST DUE TO ACETONE! CAN WE PAY SOMEONE TO DO THIS FOR US? WHY AM I WHINING IN CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE TIME???”  Your way is probably better. 

Around the same time, alert reader and friend Lee Youngblood (sailor, yacht broker, photographer) sent us an email with this subject line: “DON”T DO IT!”.  Well that got our attention! He cautioned us about rushing into making a repair at this moment in time, reminding us that butyl tape is only for applications where there is compression between pieces (and duh, we actually knew that and it’s why we didn’t use it in the first place, but I forgot about that in my pissed-off stomping fit).  He also reminded us that cold weather was not a good time for bedding material to set up well.  Lots of smacking of ourselves in the head was happening, let me tell you.

Even when I’m in a rant, the better part of my brain is working the problem and trying to find the least offensive solution, but keeping the primary goal in mind is sometimes an issue. In this case, the primary goal was keeping water out of the boat for the rainy season, not redoing the entire job. So I had started researching short term solutions, wishing that I could find something like the butyl tape we used on the ports in the hull. That stuff is working great! But, of course, getting that off would not be easy, and it would look pretty bad, too. Didn’t anyone make a clear rubbery weatherproof tape with good adhesion? A girl can dream. A girl can waste plenty of time doing the Google on stuff like this, also.foil tape

Then we got Lee Youngblood’s email suggesting we try an old cruiser trick of using aluminum tape. Bingo. In fact, we had some of that on the boat already. Another reader suggested using preservation tape, and that sounded like it would be a winner, too. But we already had the aluminum tape.  Mike used it when he was building the refrigerator box. I remember at the time he was working on the fridge he commented that he loved that stuff and could think of many uses for it. He wanted to keep some on the boat, so we had maybe half a roll left. The stuff we used is called Extreme Weather Foil Tape and it’s basically like heavy aluminum foil with a good sticky backing. Don’t ask me why we didn’t think of using that. Viva, Lee!

I hope you weren’t holding your breath waiting to see if we actually did those hatches right this time because you’ll have to wait until warm weather comes back around. That’s a lot of breath holding. Today we went down to the boat and made her water tight (hopefully) with this stuff. It’s really too wide, so first thing we did was cut each piece into two pieces of equal  width. This stuff is really easy to work with but get it right the first time when you apply it. If you have to reposition it, it’s not going to be nice and smooth anymore. We did all three hatches and are very pleased that they look decent. 

After applying the tape, I went over it with my fingers smoothing it out and making sure that the edge was firmly adhering all the way around each lens. It is easy to puncture this stuff with any kind of sharp edge, so you need to use care when smoothing. Other than that, this tape is dead easy to use and the paper backing comes off easily. 

Anyhoo, I think/hope/pray we’ve got this under control for this season. Add it to the long list of tasks to be addressed at the haul out this summer. Ideally, we’d like to be able to take the hatch lids off to work on them. I think being able to take them home and put them on the bench to work on will help us be sure all the silicone is off, if, indeed, that is the problem. The other possibility causing the leaking is that we didn’t use enough product, especially on the forward hatch. We were nervous about using too much, but may have erred on the side of being too cautious. Live and learn. Perhaps that mystery will be solved when we give it another go.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for bringing your experience to the table!

 

 

 

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Lessons in Being Persnickity

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This post is by way of doing the harsh thing that bloggers of life transitions and of sailboat ownership sometimes have to do: Post about failure. File this under ‘brutal honesty’, and also many expletives and stomping of feet; perhaps throwing a few things for good measure. I’ve never tried that, but I understand how it could be cathartic.

Remembering more relaxing times. Keep this feeling as you read on.

We’ve owned three boats. We thought we were not amateurs at this point, even though we’re always learning. Oh, hubris. What a harsh mistress you are. This summer, because the weather was fine, we got a little twitchy and decided to replace our hatch lenses. It sounds so simple, no? You just remove the lenses, clean up the frames, and rebed in the same stuff that was used in the first place.

Why did we want to replace them? Because they were old and crazed and didn’t let in much light. Did they leak? No. They did not. Did they work as they should? Yes. They did. So basically, the only thing wrong with them was cosmetic. We wanted them to be pretty. We wanted to see through them. We wanted to lie in the V-berth and look at stars while at anchor. Such petty problems to have. I guess we were a little persnickety. Joke’s on us! Now who feels old and crazed? Not the hatches.

The old but serviceable lens. Notice how you can’t see the side of my foot through the thing?

Now it’s the rainy season and we have hatches that leak. That’s right, readers, we are hatch refit failures. #Amateurs #Pissedthehelloff. Somehow, after literally spending hours scraping, using harsh chemicals that probably shortened our lives, and sanding with expensive sand paper, leaks have developed in all three hatches. All. Three. See what happens when you try to fix something that ain’t broke?

Recall that we decided to use industrial silicone to rebed those hatch lenses. It was that or butyl tape, and we couldn’t get any solid information that butyl tape would stick to silicone any better than anything else. The information is probably there, but we didn’t find it for whatever reason. People posted their thoughts. Everyone who has ever bedded anything on a boat has an opinion about the best stuff to use. In the end, we made the wrong choice, or maybe we didn’t use enough of it, or maybe there was invisible silicone left on the hatch frames. Silicone is evil, so who knows? The hatches don’t leak everywhere so probably it’s a silicone residue problem.

Except that this was a total win. Thank goodness.

The feelings we have about this are second only to the issue we had with getting a proper exhaust system for Hiram, our engine. But we rose to that challenge and, I assure you, we will not be beaten by this one. Never mind that we’re getting the house ready and the holidays are bearing down before us. Never mind that Mike has been transferred to another job in Boeing and doesn’t have the time to think about this problem. Never mind that I’m increasing the number of coaching clients I see on the boat because I’ve made a commitment to using Galapagos as my office space until I completely retire. (I’m loving this, by the way.) At least the hatch in the salon only drips a tiny bit, and the drips don’t land on my clients’ heads. I’m grateful for small things.

This weekend it’s going to be un-rainy. Lots of people will be outside enjoying the sunnyish weather. We will be outside too: removing the forward hatch lens once more. It’s the one that leaks the worst. We’re going to do that one, particular hatch and then sit back and observe the results. We’re going to clean the hell out of the frame until our fingers are tiny nubs of skin and bone. So far, we think we’re going to use butyl tape. So that’s the situation on the ground here for the moment. Keep your fingers crossed we do it right this time, and if you think of it, spit three times and turn around.

Because this is the goal.

Because this is the goal.