May 13, 2019

Scupper 142

Monday

I started with the daily round of sanding and varnish work on the head trim pieces, and also the companionway ladder hinge blocks.

The back side of the engine room door required some of the gray bilge paint to match the engine room and after spaces.  I also painted the plywood panel I’d built to cover the rougher hole beneath the galley sink.

I’d previously cut all the pieces for the forward cabin doors to size, and now I moved on with the last milling details so I could assemble the doors.  As with the other interior doors, I planned flat panels, two per door, so the next step was to mill grooves in the rails and stiles to accept the panels, which I did with a 1/4″ slot-cutting bit and a router.  The short rails were too small to allow for effective clamping, or even to clamp ineffectively and provide enough room for the router base to reach the whole length, so instead I hot-glued the small pieces to the bench and milled the slots that way.

Next, I dry-clamped the frames together tightly and routed an angled chamfer detail on the insides of the frames towards the open panel areas.

After some sanding to clean up the inside edges of all the rails and stiles (I’d await the rest of the sanding till after the doors were assembled), with the final dimensions of the panels now available (based on the slot depths), I milled four 1/4″ plywood panels to fit, and dry-fit both assemblies.

Finally, I glued together the doors with epoxy adhesive.

Much earlier, having noticed the usual evidence of seepage at a few portions of the joint between the ballast keel (external) and the fiberglass keel stump, I’d ground out the suspect areas, and these had had substantial time to air and dry out in the meantime.  Now, I decided to finish up the minor repair work here, so as needed I cut new fiberglass material to fill and span the joint where I’d earlier prepared it, and installed the new material in epoxy resin.  Later on, once the fiberglass had gelled sufficiently, I applied an early coat of fairing compound to these areas as well.

Now that the area beneath the galley was painted, I slipped in the new portable cooler, which fit well inside the space.  There was little room for it to move much from here because it would soon hit the overhead were the cooler to slide to port.

Another small lingering detail in the cabin was a restraining strap for the water tank on the port side beneath the settee.  I’d had this strap on hand for some time, but it had been neglected till I recently uncovered it in a tray of pending parts.  I installed the ratchet strap with stainless steel lags to the wooden framework around the tank.

Impatient, and unwilling to wait a few weeks for the new fiberglass securing the battery and generator platforms to fully cure before paint, I coated these new assemblies with a 2-part epoxy-based paint (which works as a tie coat to allow the final paint to cure properly over the fresh epoxy) so that I could presently finish up the gray engine room paint at my earliest whim.

Total time billed on this job today:   7.25 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  Mainly cloudy,45° Forecast for the day:  Sun and clouds, 54°