| Hattie
Mae | Thursday, September 9, 2009 When I'd moved the boat outdoors following the end of the main project a couple months ago, the companionway still needed some work to complete. The shop schedule now seemed to offer the perfect window of opportunity to complete this small, yet important, task. I moved the boat indoors to the second shop bay so that I would work independent of the weather and leave the hatch open throughout the process. |
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The original aluminum hatch slides, which had been secured to the underside of the sliding companionway hatch, had badly deteriorated over the years, succumbing to corrosion, and were no longer in existence. I had one of the old ones as a template, however. The mechanism revolved around a pair of wooden strips on the underside of the hatch, to which an L-shaped piece of aluminum was secured which, when installed properly, acted as a guide to capture the hatch on the aluminum rails secured to the boat. I made a pair of new aluminum guides from some aluminum angle, cutting off part of one leg of the angle to form the appropriate shape as per the original setup. Then, I cut strips of mahogany to replace the old ones and screwed the new aluminum pieces to the edges in the proper orientation. |
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Finally, I epoxied the wooden strips--with their aluminum guides in place--to the underside of the hatch and left it to cure. With the hatch portion of the slides thus complete, I'd be able to move forward to install the hatch slides on the cabin top and complete the installation over the next day or two. |
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