Must....find....motivation....

Struggling for enthusiasm at the moment. My winter job list is right out the window, but we are slowly ticking things off.

Test fitting new liner and teak trim in the lower salon.

I have started in on the new liners for the lower salon. I need to make up a few teak trim pieces, then we will paint and varnish everything. The plan is to also paint and touch up the varnish in the aft end of the lower salon, then we will paint out the forward end and do some touch-up work in the galley. Sharon also wants to do new upholstery, but I'll leave that right up to her....

I have the lower drum unit for the furler all apart now, thanks to my nifty new extra-long double-jointed circlip pliers, which I will no doubt never have a need for again...   A couple of the replacement bearings had to be ordered in, but hopefully I will have everything in the next week and can put her all back together again.

Old bearings and seals. Utterly f****ed .

Marks on the inside of the housing lead me to believe this
is not the first time she has had the bearings done.

Cool, huh? No idea what I will ever use them for again.

I am heading to Europe and the USA for 3 weeks at the end of September, so I am starting to get that anxious "Shit I have to finish jobs!" feeling. Still have to do the port-side cabin, strip and varnish the mizzen mast (screw it, that's a summer job), make those lockers for the upper salon, and as a bonus we have decided to rip out the never-commissioned gasoline tanks under the aft cockpit seats to create a heap more storage. That's right James, just keep adding to the list...

What was I thinking?

Yep. Just a quick job to pull out the old liners in the starboard lower salon and replace them with new ones. Sure. Did I really believe that....?

To be fair, I have been the victim of someone else's stupidity. The lockers on the starboard side have been rebuilt to be larger in the past, and when they did it they built in under the under-deck liner, so there was no way of removing it. No wonder it had been left in the manky state it was.

Before.

Before.

So I had to cut out the existing boards, which was fairly painstaking work since I had to cut right back to the edge of the teak, preferably without damaging it. In that respect, I was not so successful. I started out using a Dremel with a spiral cutter, which worked well, but then the cutter broke and I could not find another one locally. What to do? Easy - buy a bigger tool.

Been wanting a sabre saw for a while... Good excuse.

With the sabre saw I was able to cut through quickly, but had one, ahem, slip... Now I have some varnishing to do as well.

The screws that held the liners and trim pieces were absolutely stuffed, and I could only extract about half of them. The rest I had to cut through, drill out, or cut out with a chisel. It was all a bit of demolition job. Anyway, job done, now I have to make up the new liners.

See where I slipped. Oops. Sand, varnish, repeat....

On other Jobs That Take Too Long, my fancy new double-fulcrum circlip pliers arrived, and they are a big step forward - I can "almost" get the circlip out of the furler drum. Almost. Going to have to get creative.

Why is nothing easy?

I started pulling the furler drum unit apart and discovered that it was going to need some very long circlip pliers to get the job done. Shopping around all the normal tool supply companies we use and nobody had anything suitable - always "almost but not quite". So I have had to order in a special funky set care of Amazon....and he waits again.

On the positive side, I have reinstalled the injectors in the engine and with the help of my dad we today got everything adjusted and she is up and purring. Setting the injectors up actually requires a special tool which of course is totally not available, so we had to reverse engineer the process, and realised that the last time we did it we got it a bit wrong such that the injection would have been a bit off. Having done it right this time the engine is noticeably more "on song".

And I have started more woodwork, this time in the Lower Salon. The Lower Salon does not need much work, just some liner boards, but you know how it goes on boats, "That will be a quick and easy job....hold my beer...".