| Kaholee Refit |
April 3, 2007 Today was all about hardware installation: two pulpits, six stanchions, and the stainless steel rubrail. To begin, I first had to drill, tap, and countersink all the fastener holes that I had overbored and filled with epoxy yesterday. I also had to temporarily set the bow pulpit in place so that I could mark around the bases and remove excess tape from the deck, which I hadn't done yesterday. This took about an hour. With the holes all prepared, I turned to the installation. I began with the bow pulpit, then moved onto the stanchion bases, and finished up with the stern pulpit. For each fitting, I applied a heavy amount of polysulfide sealant to the deck, with extra at each fastener location, and then installed the fitting with 1/4-20 machine screws, which I threaded tightly into the tapped holes. This pulled the hardware down tightly and held it securely for the time being. The two pulpits also incorporated built-in running lights, so in each case I had to thread the wires for the lights down one of the mounts, through additional holes that I had drilled in the deck during the earlier processes. It was important to ensure that the wires went through cleanly, and didn't get hung up on their way, which might cause pinching of the wires and subsequent damage. I also had to ensure that there was plenty of additional sealant around the wires. |
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Once I had all the bases secured with screws--leaving the excess sealant squeezeout to cure and clean up later--I moved belowdecks and installed backing plates, fender and lock washers, and nuts on all the fittings. I could barely reach underside of the forward outboard mounts of the stern pulpit through the vertical access hatch in the cockpit; it would have helped if my arms had been a few inches longer. Installing the bases and pulpits, as well as all the backing plates and nuts, took nearly three hours. I had to replace some of the 1-1/2" long fasteners with 2" when I discovered that, because of unevenness in the underside of the deck laminate, I couldn't thread the required washers and nuts onto the fasteners with the backing plate in place, since moving the plate enough to begin the threads on one fastener would prevent the ability to thread the next fastener--even though I had checked before beginning that there was plenty of thread extending below the deck level. And so it goes. |
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In the afternoon, I worked on reinstalling the original stainless steel rubrail, a relatively straightforward task. I began in the center of each section to hold the unwieldy pieces roughly in balance so that a wild end wouldn't twist all over the place. The rubrail is simply screwed to the hull, and I reused the original fasteners and holes, all of which were in good condition. I sealed each fastener with polysulfide caulk, and when all the pieces were in place, I cleaned up the excess caulk as required. |
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I had hoped to use the rest of the day to install the stove gimbal brackets and the stove, but discovered that I didn't have the correct fasteners on hand. It was too late in the day to get into anything major, so I finished up with ordering and administrative office work instead. |
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