May 20, 2016
Patience 5
Friday
After finishing up some work on another boat, and awaiting a shipment paint later in the day, I turned to the halyard stoppers located on the cabin trunk. There were four of these, and they appeared original. The owner requested replacement.
Removal was straightforward. The barrel nuts on the interior had been painted over, but fortunately came off without issue, and soon the old hardware was removed.
The new stoppers were essentially identical to the old, with the same bolt pattern. I extend my congratulations to Spinlock for not changing something just for the sake of change, even decades later.
After cleaning old sealant and debris from the deck, I used a 5/8″ bit to overbore the old bolt holes, removing the top skin and core at each location. The core (plywood) was in good condition in all areas. Drilling this deck, which was fabricated from Kevlar cloth, brought back lots of memories from my first boatbuilding job in 1990, at a well-known builder that was, at the time, experimenting with Kevlar and E-glass hybrids. My enduring memory of Kevlar cloth was the fuzzy nature of the material whenever one cut the raw cloth, or sanded/cut the finished laminate, and the fuzzy bits that came up as I drilled into this deck now just reminded me of it all, oh so long ago.
Once I had the holes cleaned up, and masked over the bottom openings, I filled the holes with a thickened epoxy mixture, leaving it to cure before continuing.
My new paint for the boottop arrived just in time, and I looked forward to getting the first coat on. The owner had a clear sense of the color scheme he wanted, but working with online color samples (notoriously inaccurate) we’d eventually decided to purchase two different shades of the blue he hoped for. The first shade that arrived looked a close match to the samples, but might have been too light on the boat itself, so I’d ordered the next-darker shade, called Sky Blue. When this arrived, I thought it looked like the right color for the main, wide stripe of the boottop. The narrow upper stripe was to be bright red.
After final preparations, and starting with the red on the uppermost stripe, I applied the first coat of paint to the boottop, finishing up with the sky blue on the lower stripe once the red was done. To my eye this all looked pretty good.
Total time billed on this job today: 3.5 hours
0600 Weather Observation:
48°, mostly clear. Forecast for the day: mainly sunny, 76°