110 Cookson Lane | Whitefield, ME 04353 | 207-232-7600 | tim@lackeysailing.com
Using three different drill bits I had on hand, I milled the beginnings of recesses for the cockpit scupper fittings planned for the boat. The fittings, made of Marelon, featured angled heads that would sit flush with the cockpit sole. With two different Forstner bits, I created a stepped recess to accommodate the angled head, then drilled through the temporary plug in the cockpit sole with a hole saw to allow passage of the fitting itself.
This left a slightly oversize recess that I planned to fill with epoxy later, using the fittings themselves as molds. Late in the day, my first attempt at this task failed, as I found that the way I'd taped up the fittings prevented them from seating themselves properly flush as intended (and as I'd done during the dry fit), so I removed the fittings and cleaned up the epoxy, and would try again on another day.
Afterwards, I sanded all the cockpit surfaces several times, bringing the surfaces close to their final stages of preparation.
The corners of the cockpit well and other areas, plus the gutters for the locker lids and along the sides of the cockpit seats, required a significant amount of hand work to remove the final vestiges of old paint, where the tools had not been able to reach so far. With scraper, detail sander, and by hand, I removed the final bits from the corners, and cleaned out and sanded the locker gutters as well as possible.
I scraped and sanded clean the starboard cockpit seat gutter, where no power tools would reach, which was a lot of work thanks to the many layers of thick, cracked paint and other debris, but ran out of steam before I could attack its port counterpart, the final section remaining.
Total Time on This Job Today: 7.5 hours
