February 13, 2018
Jasmine 50
Tuesday
I was out of the shop much of the morning on other business, but before lunch I installed the two “new” self-tailing winches on the winch islands. These winches were older Barient model 24-45.
Later, I worked on a few straggling hardware tasks, including installing the two locker latches on the cockpit lockers.
At the poop deck, I marked the hole locations for the deck side of the steering room hatch hinge and prepared the holes for fasteners in the usual way, removing the core material and filling the voids with thickened epoxy.
The windlass I removed earlier, an old but reliable aluminum Simson-Lawrence Hyspeed manual model, still worked well according to the owner, but the finish on the case was worn and in poor condition. The owner requested that I refinish it to the extent realistically possible. I’d been walking by the windlass for weeks, ignoring it and hoping it would magically take care of itself, but alas.
It was a happenstance that I ended up working on the windlass on this day. I’d been looking for something else, unrelated, in the shop and stumbled upon a nearly identical windlass in my parts inventory. This windlass had some issues–part of the capstan was broken off, and the operation was stiff at best–but might still be valuable as a source of parts, beginning with the gypsy, which was a smaller size than the one off Jasmine, which was sized for 3/8″ BBB chain–a massive size when contemplating an all-chain rode, as was the owner. The other gypsy hopefully was sized for 5/16″ chain, which would be a good choice going forward. I used the attic windlass as a test bed, since it didn’t matter so much if I harmed anything, and soon found it was straightforward to remove the gypsy. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was well into the windlass painting preparations.
I had no need, desire, nor inclination to disassemble the “real” windlass nor to rebuild anything that didn’t require it, and not wanting to adversely affect the winch’s currently excellent operation, I chose to leave things pretty much as is during my preparations. However,armed with new confidence after working on the “attic” windlass, I removed the chain gypsy to improve access. I removed all the paint from the casing by hand, exposing the bare aluminum; it didn’t really take much to remove the old, failed coating.
With adequate preparations, I applied epoxy primer to the windlass with a small disposable sprayer.
While I had the primer going, I also sprayed the two original mast steps, which I’d prepared earlier with light sanding as needed; the original finish was gelcoat over the molded fiberglass steps.
Total time billed on this job today: 5.25 hours
0600 Weather Observation: 8°, clear. Forecast for the day: Sunny, 20s