April 2, 2025

Miss Helen 13

Wednesday

Now that the sealant had had adequate cure time, I removed the excess from the exterior of the window, cutting carefully along the edge then removing the sealant and tape.  This posed no issues.  Then, I pared away the excess teak bungs and sanded the trim as needed, and sanded the small section of remaining cabin trunk surrounding the window.  I vacuumed and solvent-washed to clean up the final debris and sanding dust.

Inside the boat, I cleaned off a few spots of cured sealant on the inside of the glass and checked once more the overall appearance of the seal between glass and exterior trim, now fully visible and with the excess sealant and tape removed from the outside.

I installed the interior trim, using the screws that had been holding it at the start of the project, then masked the inside face of the trim, closest to the glass, and also masked the glass itself, following the line if the trim were to extend all the way to the glass.  The tape would make it easier to tool and clean up the sealant more easily and neatly.

I applied a heavy bead of sealant into the groove between the glass and trim, then pressed and tooled it with a finger to finish off the seam.

Finally, I removed the tape to leave a clean line of sealant, and this wrapped up the installation.  I reinstalled the trim I’d removed from the edge between cabin trunk and sidedeck as well.

Back on deck, I lightly sanded the first coat of varnish I’d applied to most areas last time, preparing for a second maintenance coat.  I vacuumed and solvent-washed thoroughly thereafter.  Apparently I forgot to take any pictures from the starboard side, but you get the idea.

Finally, I applied a coat of varnish to the starboard cabin trunk side, to catch this area up with the rest of the boat, since I’d left this unvarnished till the window trim was complete.  Before doing the varnish on the whole side, I’d dabbed some varnish onto the raw teak bungs to get some finish started in those areas first, and ultimately the new window trim would require a few more coats of varnish to build up enough varnish on the new bungs.  This was a good opportunity to also take care of the second coat on the swashboards and tiller.

Total time billed on this job today: 5.5 hours