Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Day 93 - Assembling pieces again

Well, today was pretty simple. I cut the hawse pipe down to length, covered the bottom of the hole with blue tape for support, thoroughly covered the pipe with 3M 4200, wiggled it into the hole, put a bead around the top edge and put a strip of blue tape across the top to hold it in place when I flipped the deck over.

Opened up the Bilgekote again and after covering the drain holes again, painted the area I fiberglassed in yesterday, the areas I sanded and pushed some into the drain holes with the brush.

Made some epoxy and covered the top of the shelves and the bottom of the deck, then made peanut butter and with a serrated scraper applied a coat to the top of the shelves. This was done to fill in any gaps between the shelves and the deck, but without applying so much that the squeeze out would be uncontrollable. I very carefully lifted the deck into the hull (not wanting to bump the hawse pipe), climbed in and then just as carefully aligned it and set it on the shelves. I screwed in the two locator screws and then climbed out on the deck to use my weight to push the deck down into the peanut butter and then drove screws to hold it in place.

Being way out at the tip of the bow was a little freaky. Mentally I knew the boat wasn't going to tip down, but it was hard to convince that animal brain!

After putting in the screws I scraped up the squeeze out and used it to fill the gaps between the sides and the shelves. On the port side that gap was almost 3/8" so after pushing peanut butter in I covered it with blue tape to try to keep it from flowing back out. :-)




Took the tape off the drain holes and cleaned up the paint that flowed out. I suspect I'll find more runout on the hull tomorrow, but nothing I can do about that, can't cover up the holes.

Tomorrow the shelving continues!

3 Hours