Thursday, November 26, 2009 |
Author: Jacob
We trust everyone at home is gorging themselves on the traditional Thanksgiving meal, we miss you and would love to eat ourselves into a food coma with you today! Instead we are celebrating by paying someone else to sand the bottom paint off Pisces, thereby saving us hours of standing in a cloud of toxic copper-based paint dust, it's well worth the cost.
Equally as exciting as having the bottom sanded is that we are in the home stretch of our monster rudder/skeg project. Here is a bit of a recap of the steps we undertook to rebuild the skeg:
1) Grind...grind...grind...angle grinder with 24 grit disks...lots of disks...
2) Have a brief freakout about how much fiberglass we took off of the hull of the boat.
3) Apply 6 layers of medium weight fiberglass cloth with epoxy.
4) 2 coats of unthickened epoxy to fill the final weave.
5) Dry fit the rudder, mark hole positions.
6) Drill out all thru-bolt hulls oversize (3/4") and fill with chopped fiberglass and epoxy.
7) Patch small hole where we got too enthusiastic with an orbital sander.
8) Re-fit rudder, drill bolt holes.
9) Apply 3 layers of epoxy barrier coat (generously donated by a fellow cruiser!).
10) Go to local bar, check internet and write this blog.
11) Put rudder in place, seal bolts with 4200.
Most of the last week has required a Tyvek suit.
Fitting the rudder. Alignment turned out to not be much of an issue, everything is smooth and no play in the system.
Grey is the epoxy-based barrier coat, you can also see the patches on the rudder where we did exploratory surgery this summer.
That's all for now, today we are going to dinghy out to Tao, grill some arrachera and enjoy being on the water. Miss you all!
Equally as exciting as having the bottom sanded is that we are in the home stretch of our monster rudder/skeg project. Here is a bit of a recap of the steps we undertook to rebuild the skeg:
1) Grind...grind...grind...angle grinder with 24 grit disks...lots of disks...
2) Have a brief freakout about how much fiberglass we took off of the hull of the boat.
3) Apply 6 layers of medium weight fiberglass cloth with epoxy.
4) 2 coats of unthickened epoxy to fill the final weave.
5) Dry fit the rudder, mark hole positions.
6) Drill out all thru-bolt hulls oversize (3/4") and fill with chopped fiberglass and epoxy.
7) Patch small hole where we got too enthusiastic with an orbital sander.
8) Re-fit rudder, drill bolt holes.
9) Apply 3 layers of epoxy barrier coat (generously donated by a fellow cruiser!).
10) Go to local bar, check internet and write this blog.
11) Put rudder in place, seal bolts with 4200.
Most of the last week has required a Tyvek suit.
Fitting the rudder. Alignment turned out to not be much of an issue, everything is smooth and no play in the system.
Grey is the epoxy-based barrier coat, you can also see the patches on the rudder where we did exploratory surgery this summer.That's all for now, today we are going to dinghy out to Tao, grill some arrachera and enjoy being on the water. Miss you all!
3 comments:
Thanks for keeping us informed. We didn't gorge ourselves, but had a good quiet Thanksgiving with Figaro and Lucy, our new 5-year-old cat. The two of them are starting to relate to each other. Fortunately, neither of them is an alpha!
Love, Dad
Sounds like a wonderful way to spend Thanksgiving. Say Hi to Shawn and Chris for us.
Great job on the projects. You guys are getting so close!
hey there..rudder looks good- will you be far away in February?..you got to meet Virgils smaller brother...Roy- our new crew member- and man will that be news to him!.. miss you and hope to cross paths soon..alex