Archive for the 'progress' Category
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
*%$@! Again!
I really do have the best luck. All of the rain these past couple of days made the footings under the scafolding kind of well… mushy. Combine that with 1 guy in a hurry who tends to jump from the boat the scafolding and you get… 1 guy who lands on his ass and sprains his ankle really bad after the scafolding collapses.
I tried to ignore it and took a break and then went back to work but it wasn’t happening. Quite quickly I found myself unable to walk on my left foot (it was the right one last year) and had to quit. With a small tear in my eye I hobbled to the car and went home. Fearing a moron bone break I had an x-ray done and thankfully, just a sprain.
Well, I guess I have to take a look at it this way; at least it gives me a chance to blow a ton of money on the parts that I’m missing… *sigh*
Friday, July 18th, 2008
A change in process (or, small projects don’t make sense)
So with the toe rail plinth pretty much done, the tiller bumper roughed out, and the cabin sole in shambles, the starboard side sort of faired, the hull to deck joint needed its finishing round over and the aft scroll work needing its fairing, I came to the start realization that I was at the cross roads of a hundred tiny projects that are keeping me all over the place. The result is the feeling that I’m not getting anything done that’s really substantial. All to often I find myself mixing a tiny batch of fairing compound when I KNOW that the entire deck could use a coat or two. To compound my frustration I had this sudden urge to pry off all of my deadlights to see just how new portlights would look. An hour later with my head out the now empty deadlight I said “ok, time to change process”.
Luckily this coincided with lunch time so I grabbed a sandwich, a nice big sharpie, and the plywood portlight blanks I had cut out and drew out my plan of attack.
I drew everything up and then decided that 2 weeks per project, only that project would be a good pace. The breakdown is as follows:
- engine install and cabin sole
- sanding deck, patching holes, putting in portlights
- toerail install, sanding hull, sanding new deck joint
- bowsprit
8 weeks of work but it gets me into September ready for priming/painting and cabinet building for the winter. An aggressive schedule for sure, but I like it that way.
Monday, July 14th, 2008
toe rail plinth
One thing that Tartan did that was really, really smart on the T30 was putting a built up ‘glass plinth under things that were through bolted. This had the effect of making a little island above the deck when there was water on it. As a result the toe rail rarely leaked from passive moisture like rain (driving rain and spray may have been a different story though). I think its a good design and it’s only failing is that it wasn’t continued everywhere on the boat; the bow pulpit and the aft pulpit are a mess of star cracks, stained (wet) gel coat, and only locally wet core (thankfully). So step on with the toe rail is to rebuild the shattered plinth that I cut away a year ago.
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Unwrapping after a long winter slumber
Sometimes you just have to say “I’m sorry, but I have to go work on my boat”. I’m way, way over due to be back on the job so I finally just quit it all and moved back to NJ (sorry NYC). My Dad was just as eager as I was to unwrap the boat so he came along for the trip. I also too some time to to a quick code re-write to the blog, I figured it was all in the spirit of “spring cleaning” (even though it’s almost summer…) .
Still standing, thats a good sign…
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
“I’ve moved, back in the spring”
Yeah it’s a bit more than the “out to lunch” , “back in 10″ or “out in the back, ring the bell” signs. I’m back in New York City to make money so I can actually finish this project. More to come.
—>dave
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Honey, I shrunk the boat…
I had to say it. Come on, how can you resist? Anyway, I managed to get the cover on myself but if I could do it again I’d want one other person help me with wrestling the 40# floppy bundle of plastic, especially when you have to some how throw the entire bundle on top of your 6′ tall frames… Once I got it there it was no problem though.
I didn’t have time to really shrink the whole boat so for now I used an electric heat gun to sort of tack the whole cover in place. If you heat up two pieces of shrink wrap and slam them together, they vulcanize and become one piece. I put a rope over the shrink wrap, around the whole boat, and then vulcanized it all the way around. The heat gun worked great for this purpose but to shrink the whole thing I’m going to need to come up with something gas fired. But for now the cover is on and is water tight. Considering how much simpler this cover could have been, and how little time it took me to do it, I don’t see why people pay $400-$500 to get this done.
The cost break down was:
- $200 for enough 8 mil (most boat yards use 5 or 6 mil by the way) for 3 covers
- $147 for the PVC (I’ll recoop $45 of this when I return some of the pipe)
- $38 in lumber and screws
- recycled rope
- old wire
- a bunch of time
total is $340 for all materials and $206 if you were to count that I only used 1/3 of the roll of shrink. Oh, and that $400-$500 estimate is just to have the plastic shrink wrap put on and shrunk, you have to make the frame… Not bad me thinks.
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
It’s a bloat!
“Bloat” was the best sounding version of the melding of the words “boat” and “blimp”. The other two were “bomp” or “blat” so I went with bloat, it also seems rather fitting considering how much fatter the frame will make Hobyn.
Sunday, November 25th, 2007
Operation Mast Down (part 2)
Ok remember when I said this wasn’t a one man job, well it turns out it wasn’t a two man job either. My little sister had nothing going on today so she was roped (no pun intended) into helping out. We started out by aligning the rails to the stands and the mast while I had Julie soap the hell out of the cars so they wouldn’t bind on the rails.
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
Operation Mast Down (part 1)
The stands are built and ready to go, the cars have been made up, and the parts for the rails are all assembled. Tomorrow we take the sucker down!
Friday, November 23rd, 2007
The second dismasting of Hobyn
Well its the day after Turkey Day and I’m doing just what everyone else is doing… Thinking about how to take a 300 lb. 45 ft aluminum mast off a boat with a beam of 10 feet that is 12 off the ground. What do you mean you’re shopping or sleeping off dinner?