Systems - Hull Slug: setbacks-and-problems Status: published

This week was full of unexpected issues and problems and very little movement forward on projects.

It started out when we noticed the some leaking with our newly installed portlights, which is fine really, a bit of tweaking was expected. However the leak got into the new wood (which was not marine grade) and caused it to swell. So we’re going to have pull down the new cabin top wood and re-seat the portlights to do that. We are not looking forward to that as the new wood was put up with epoxy, much grinding or demolition is going to be involved in that. New marine grade plywood has been ordered, if you learn one thing from me do not skimp on materials. I don’t normally skimp we did this one time and it bit us hard. Take the time to do it right and use the right materials.

This next one really pisses me off. When I had the yard install the conduit in the mast I also specified that they pull messenger lines to the masthead, spreaders and foredecksteaming light. Well they did that but they didn’t make the holes big enough for the wire. I didn’t specify a size and they didn’t ask so this is really a communication problem (one of many with the yard) but I’m not sure why they would drill any holes without explicitly knowing what size. So, I had to drill new holes in the conduit and snake new messenger lines. Once that was done I find out that I still can’t get the wire to pull through because at the angle I’m pulling (90 degrees right out the hole) all I can do is flex the tubing once the wire has exited. I can’t get any more vertical pull. That lead to an almost complete meltdown on my part. I was thinking I’d had to eat the cost the boat cable and pull primary wires instead. Now I’m thinking maybe I can pull back several feet of the insulation and still pull the wire. We’ll see. I’m sure it’s going to be another week of dinking around with that whereas I expected to be done pulling wires this weekend.

Dawn did make progress on some painting though. When we originally pulled down the hull lining and painted we left all the teak in place that covered the chainplates. We have since removed that teak and pulled the chainplates to clean them up and we’ve decided we’re going to not re-install that teak instead leaving the chainplates uncovered so we can see them and any leaking or corrosion issues. So Dawn has been painting that exposed fiberglass white to match the areas we had previously painted white. This is good because now I can start rebedding the chainplates. I’ll have an entire post on that process.

I didn’t really want to write this post, but I figured it was important so you can all learn from our mistakes and see that doing a refit like this is a lot of work and despite planning things will go awry. So with that unpleasantness behind us we are ready to kick much but in the next couple of weeks with our complete focus on everything needed to re-step the masts.