February 19, 2020

Scupper 245

Wednesday

With a commitment away from the shop, I knew it would be a shorter day, and it seemed a good time to finish up the paint work on the spreaders and on the mainsheet riser block.  So one of the first tasks of the day was to get set up and prepare the paint, and then over the course of the day I sprayed three coats of the same gloss white paint I’d used on the spars, hull, and deck.  I segregated the spreaders in the main shop, since I didn’t have any good way to secure them for painting in my small paint room upstairs where I worked on the mainsheet, so I could still do some work in the woodshop, but I mostly stayed out of the boat during the day because of the paint fumes.

In and around the three coats of paint, I finished up the work on the new mast wiring cover box, sanding it smooth and rounding the edges for appearance before applying a sealer coat of varnish, the first of several to build up the required finish.

I finished up the battery box top extensions on the final three boxes, so these were ready for installation as soon as I could make the other final preparations needed in the engine room.  To that end, I milled a series of cleats from teak leftover from the bowsprit project, and I planned to use these cleats to help secure the boxes on the shelves in the engine room, along with straps as I’d used for the forward battery bank.  I also milled cleats for that battery, a bit of additional support to be sure the battery box couldn’t slide.  I planned to epoxy and screw these cleats in place as needed to secure the bottoms of the boxes, and would continue with that work shortly.

Total time billed on this job today:  5.5 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  20°, partly cloudy, 5-6″ of new snow down from yesterday.  Forecast for the day:  Sunny and windy, 35° but getting colder throughout the day