It's a Family Affair

Will the varnishing never end? (No, it won't, just deal with it...)

Sharon stripping the old varnish off the back of the cockpit.

Varnished winch bases. It's the little things...

Isi helps out with the sanding.

Warm Beer

Aaaargh! The fridge stopped working! Warm beer! Nooooooooooooooo!!!

Now, I pride myself in being able to fix most systems on a boat, but as far as I am concerned refrigeration is a black art. Got the man down, who soon diagnosed a combination of low gas levels and incorrect settings on the pressure switch (which was causing the fridge and freezer to shut down and refuse to run again when we ran them with the auxiliary water cooling system). All fixed up now, with the added bonus that we can now run the water cooling system, which will be needed in the height of summer.

He also gave me some good advice on how to get the beer fridge in the lower salon working properly, something we have not bothered with until now. You can never have enough cold beer...

Endless Bloody Varnish

Haven't posted for a while, but it's not that nothing has been happening. Been very busy, in as much as the weather will let us. The brightwork continues to march along; today finished the front of the cabin, though still have a bit to do to on some of the lockers.

Front of cabin under way (about 5 coats at this point)

We have been doing some work in the engine room. Have added pulley covers for the front pulleys and over the alternators, so it's a bit safer now when the engine is running. As any petrolhead knows, the raw power output of any engine is directly related to the amount of chrome, and we have added a fair bit of bling, with shiny new air intakes, polished rocker covers with nice new domehead bolts, stainless galore, and a new fuel line (the old one was shot) done of course in chrome braid. All that chrome must be worth at least 50hp  ;-).

Bling!

Have been doing various jobs inside. We now have a fully functioning stereo system, with speakers in the upper and lower salon. I even managed to retain the retro speaker grills upstairs,

'60's low-fi chic.

We got around to putting down a final coat of polyurethane on the upper salon floor, fixing the balls-up from when the last tin we used previously was mis-labelled as gloss when it was in fact matt. I also moved the salon table out 100mm (no small job!). The previous owner had widened the settees to allow them to be used as berths, but had not moved the table so you could not even fit your feet in behind it.

Boring shot, but we were excited - now we can actually comfortably use the table!

I will post some shots soon of the finished brightwork. We are going to start on the paintwork on the port side shortly, so that should really start to pull everything together.