Another one bites the dust...

Did another winch. No need for pictures, you know the routine... One more to go.

The Cover

Here it is.

It fits. It's waaaay easier to put on and take off. And it stows easier.

We are pleased.

It's Hard To Kill Bronze

So, in my last post I noted that first winch was by no means the worst...

I give you Exhibit B.

Was "leaving them to deal with later" the best approach? I enter no plea. In actual fact it is not as big a mess as it looks, but it was pretty fouled up with dirt and crud due to the drain hole in the base having become blocked - I think I just flushed a little bit of California away.

Anyway, during a very, very extended lunchtime break today...

And she's all good again. A couple of the roller bearings are rather pitted, but not enough to warrant replacement given what a limited workload these winches have.

Two down, two to go.

Antikythera Mechanism

Long-time followers of the blog may recall the marathon efforts undertaken by Jon and later myself in getting all the winches back to operating condition after more than a decade of sitting around. Most were fine, and just needed some love, but the four foredeck winches (for spinnaker control) were in the saddest shape. Two we got working, but were in the "Must get back to that some time" category, while the other two were in the "Yuck, hide it, will deal to that when we have some serious time on our hands".

Now is the time.

We don't run a spinnaker - Minneys Yacht Surplus in Newport Beach has all our spinnakers...if you haven't sold them by now I'd be happy to take them back off your hands.  :-)   Because of that the need to tear the foredeck winches apart has not been great. But now we are doing the bulwarks, and I am going to remove the bronze stands that the outer winches sit on to have them stripped and recoated, so the first of the Evil Four has come off.

Here it is in all it's pre-service glory - and this is by no means the worst of them.

Nice, huh? To the machine shop, Batman!

A few hours later...

I could of gone further and bead-blasted all the bronze parts, but, you know, I'm trying to have a life...

One down, three to go.

Finally, some good ole sanding weather!

Back to the bulwarks...

And Yes, the mainsail cover is finished! Will post a pic when we get around to fitting it.

And the sail cover is.... Finished. Ish....kind of...

We finished the sail cover on Saturday. And then realised we had sewn in the closure zip at the front upside down. Shit. Double-stitched it, too.

I will post pics of the finshed product once we have unpicked the damn zip and put it in the right way around. To be fair, it's the only real screw-up we made. Honest.

Meccano Set

Having installed a brand new washing machine I had to decide how I was going to fix it to the mounting frame. For the previous used machines I had just drilled through the frame at the base and bolted directly to the frame, which worked well. But as this is a brand new washing machine I was somewhat reluctant to just go drilling holes through the frame, and in any case the frame design of this one does not easily lend itself to that approach.

My solution was to construct a clamp system out of stainless bar. I removed the base cover from the washing machine, inserted bars across-ways and front-and-back over the frame base, and then bolted these to similar bars clamped against the underside of the mounting frame. Just tighten the whole lot up and that baby isn't going anywhere.*

* I say with reasonable confidence. However, I have attached a restraining cable to the back of the machine and bolted the other end to a hull rib - if she ever lets go at least she won't get launched across the engine room!

Sail Cover

OK, so I said with some luck we would have the sail cover finished this weekend.

No luck.

We are down to the fiddly bits now - zips, fasteners, leather trim, PVC liner around the mast section, and so on, so progress has slowed.

Next weekend, maybe. I hope so, I need to post about something other than this bloody cover.

Stitching in the PVC liner, to protect the fabric around the mast from the wire rope halyards etc.

Would be nice to have the long-arm version of the sewing machine.

That's not a chain-plate... THIS is a chain-plate.

I have started working on the lower saloon. I made a new headliner over the port side settee while I was repainting the headliners from the aft cabin, and of course once you start...

I stripped out one of the port side lockers which we had lined temporarily in California... Four years counts as temporary, doesn't it? I'm going to line it properly, but while I am at it I thought y'all might be interested in seeing what a real chain-plate looks like.

For a sense of scale, those bolts are 5/8" and the cupboard is about 1m wide. The chain-plate proper comes down and is bolted into a fabricated box section that has flanges at the back which are in turn bolted into the hull and through a bronze backer plate. The backer plate runs fore and aft under the ribs, and is a full length run between the lower stay chain-plates, a distance of about 1.6m. This backer plate is itself fastened into the hull along it's length (the columns of small fasteners you can see).

Certainly a different class of engineering from the little bits of stainless that count as chain-plates on a modern production boat.

Cover me!

I hate winter. My blog becomes very boring.

This weekend we...worked on the sail cover. What a surprise. The good news is we did a test fit and it seems we actually got it all correct. Wow. I fitted all the snaps along the length of it, so now we just need to fit the zip etc at the front end, stich in the vinyl protection fabric around the mast section, and finish the tail. With a little (lot) of luck we will have it done next weekend.

Putting the mainsail back on so we can test fit the cover. Yes, it's as big a mission as it looks.

In the mean time I am repainting all the headliners from the master cabin that I made last season, as I was not happy with the paint finish. We also installed a brand new washing machine since our last one self-destructed in spectacular fashion at 1400rpm. Had a major "uh-oh" moment when it looked like it would not fit through the engine room door, but we made it with 5mm to spare.

Just. Want. Summer.

(Better crack on and finish those bulwarks though...)