Second weekend of the
refit..
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Its Friday and Julie's home taking care of the kiddies. I
can get some work done on the boat. Cool!
JEThro showed up and checked out the boat, but I missed
him. That was a bummer. It would have been nice to have some
company.
This is as far as I got before I was rained out. Being
down under the boat wearing jacket, cap, mask and goggles,
and running the sander; I didn't notice that it had
started raining 'till water started running down the keel.
"Whoops!" I was standing in a puddle holding a wet 110 Volt
sander in my hand. I didn't like that idea at all.
After sulking a bit I gave it up as a loss and headed
home.
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Sunday.. That's right I missed Saturday. It looked like
rain, so I decided not to go. Turned out it didn't rain.
Life..
Sunday I get an early start. Gonna' sand and sand. This
is as far as I made it when my brand new Dewalt sander lost
its grip. You can see the sanding pads lying at the bottom
of the keel. It just suddenly spit them out.
"I don't feel like sanding anymore, thank you very
much!"
"Great, what am I supposed to do now?"
I've been at this sanding far to long. I'm starting to
argue with the sander.
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Lets try picking all the little bits of cloth out of the
velcro. This should only take maybe a year!
Really, I did just that. What else could I do? I didn't
feel like purchasing yet another sander.
"Growl.."
It didn't work. Well it did, kinda'. About 5 minutes and
it spit out the next sanding pad.
Stumped..
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Ta da! All done!
Digging through the back of the truck I found my old
trusty Black & Decker palm sander and some 36 grit
paper. Maybe not so fast, but its reliable! And the paper is
a lot cheaper. The boat yard charges $2.60 per disk for the
round stuff.
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Hey GMCJET, what's missing in this picture?
HOT1GMCJET, a Banderlog customer, has been giving
me grief about cleaning up the prop. I've been dragging my
feet on it but he's got a point.
Shaft is all shined up, strut is as clean as I'm going to
get it and the prop is pulled.
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I just remembered why I didn't want to get into cleaning
up the prop. At last count it takes about 4 .. 5 hands to
reassemble it back on the shaft. Not only that, But I can't
find the manual and there is a lot of "Line up mark A with
tab B" kinda' stuff to figure out.
Arrgh.. What a mess.
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Blast from the past!
Chris
Corlett. Chris was a yacht broker at J-Boats when
I bought No Tomorrows back in '92. Turns out he has
an office right next to where I'm working on the boat. I ran
into him when I was in there, looking like a homeless guy,
stealing water out of his water cooler. I told him to look
nautical and caught him cracking up.
I've been pretty much out of the sailing world for the
last 9 years. Back in 92, J/35s were spoken of in hushed
voices with a lot of "Ohhs and Ahhhs". Now they seem to be
all but forgotten. Everyone wants these new fangled J/105s
and other such nonsense. It was great fun to get some of the
scoop about what changed in the world of sailing and what
happened to everyone I used to know.
The best story was of the two guys that worked on the
commissioning of No Tomorrows. Back then, I was
The Customer and could strut around smokin' a big fat
cigar. They were The Grunts and had to do all the
work. Well, things have changed and tables have turned.
Either of them could probably very easily buy their own
J-Boat if they wanted. I can barley afford a bottom
job on mine.When I'm not feeling jealous, I'm really glad
for them. :-) They earned it, those two really busted
tail.
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So what's next? Chris says he may be able to locate some keel
templates for me. I don't plan on doing a "Class minimum" kind of
job. I just need to get things close and even. I guess the next bit
is to grind in a base coat of epoxy for the faring and stuff to stick
to. I could have started that Sunday, but it was a good stopping
point with the keel stripped and the prop pulled. I'll give myself
some time to think and regroup before tackling the faring bit.
Then there is the prop cleanup. I better tell the kiddies not to
touch the prop bits on the workbench. If they play about with it and
loose any, it will be their allowances for the rest of their lives to
replace them. I don't know about now, but when I bought this prop
they were being hand made and as far as I could tell, nothing was
interchangeable.
Then, of course, there is the bottom job itself. How much prep
does one do for this? Never having prepped a boat for a bottom job, I
don't even know what grit sand paper to start with. Should I strip
all the old paint off? Should I just smooth it out?
So that's it for this weekend. Tune in next weekend when Jim
says... "Oh dear, that was stupid, wasn't it?"
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