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As part of “The Refit” we’re going to have the spars refinished. In order to that you have to remove all of the hardware from the spars (masts, booms, spreaders). You can pay \$80 an hour to have to the yard do it, or you can buy a \$180 drill press and spend a lot of your own hours doing it. Since we have a workshop, that’s pretty much a no brainer. The Ryobi Drill press was acquired along with some cobalt drill bits (\$45!!!). The drill bits were worth it. They have definitely held up and I’m am very abusive to drill bits. When working with metal you need to let the bits cool down more than I do. when I using standard bits they were burning up lik emad; these are holding up very well.

We haven’t pulled the entire rig, just the sails, running rigging and booms. I’ve completely removed all the hardware from bottom booms and only had one real oopsy and that was when I broke the off a piece of the boom end cap that holds the outhaul. I’m not even sure these cast aluminum caps are going to be worth re-using so I’m not that concerned about it to be honest.

Thus far everything has been going pretty well the booms were a good step project to working on the masts when we have the rigged pulled.