February 27, 2021

Lively Heels Phase 3-26

Friday

During the week, as time allowed, I continued work on the cockpit storage box fairing, starting with the newly-sanded first coat that I’d left from the weekend.

Second round of fairing:

Another round of light sanding, then a third, minor, coat of fairing:

One more round of finish sanding brought the cockpit box to ready-for-primer state.

At the holding tank, I installed a 45° elbow at the top of the pumpout tee to provide better access:  The original setup  had been somewhat impeded by the hose directly above, an oversight that could easily have been (but wasn’t) avoided with a slightly different location for the fitting in the tank.  Fortunately, the elbow made for a quick and successful fix.

Continuing the closet shelving project, I transferred the marks from my cardboard patterns to a sheet of 12mm marine plywood and cut out the new shelves, which fit well on the first try other than needing to cut out a little corner of the top shelf to allow for some wiring to pass.

For all the shelves, to help hold the proposed storage bins in place while still allowing the bins to be removed (more of a concern with the lower shelves where clearances were tighter), I milled 1″ tall fiddles from cherry and cut them to length to span the widths of each shelves, including the two original shelves still in place.  These fiddles would also add strength and stiffness to the relatively wide shelves.  With the two new shelves available on the bench, I chose to install these fiddles now, using glue and screws.  I’d install the remaining fiddles on the other shelves in place a little later.

In keeping with the existing shelves, I chose to finish the new shelves with varnish, which looked pretty good even on the meranti plywood but more importantly would provide protection going forward.  I applied a thinned sealer coat of varnish to both sides of the new shelves, supporting them on some simple spikey things I use from time to time, and also finished the two new fiddles for the existing shelves.

Total time billed on this job today (and preceding days):  3.25 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  15°, clear.  Forecast for the day:   Sunny, 30°.