Friday 9 February 2018

Moving forward

I started in the aft cabin again this week fitting the cleats for the starboard forward locker front panel which is now in place temporarily.


Starboard forward panel in place

Over the weekend I made some stainless steel corner pieces to hold the top of the engine space access covers in place the job will be completed by fitting latches on the bottom edge of the covers these have arrived today, I hope, from ASAP Supplies I will find out later when I open the box.


Access panels with stainless corner pieces

That is about all I can do in the aft cabin for the moment I need spray adhesive for the lining carpet and plywood for the shelves in the lockers so I have moved on to the forward cabin on Wednesday I fitted the locker front panels in place so that I could measure for the plywood for the base of the lockers I will also require some more lining carpet and spray adhesive, the locker front panels require a good clean up to remove the old adhesive and the plan is to paint them white in a similar manner to the aft cabin.


Forward cabin locker panels

The companionway steps in the aft cabin and the saloon are made up of stainless rails with wooden treads bolted on the rails are bolted through the cockpit bulkheads at the top of both sets of steps these bolts have been sealed to prevent water ingress so when I wanted to get the locker front panels into the aft cabin and the batteries into the battery locker in the saloon I had to remove one of the treads rather than taking out the whole ladder with the subsequent resealing of the bolts at the top. The bolts securing the treads were an odd mixture of stainless machine screws with brass nuts and some were difficult to remove so I had the idea of replacing all the bolts securing the treads with stainless bolts with stainless wingnuts to make the job easier in the future this will also make access to the after end of the engine space much easier as can be seen from the photograph above. After collecting the required bolts and wingnuts from the chandlers yesterday I set about replacing all the nuts and bolts securing the treads as the first job this morning.


Wingnuts securing treads

For the rest of today I set about cleaning up the top of the internal moulding in the forward cabin removing all the over painting, adhesive splashes and other staining.


Inner moulding before clean up


After clean up on starboard side

There is still a bit more work to do on the port side which will be the first job next week, but before the forward cabin can be completed I need to finish the wiring to the navigation lights on the pulpit I left some draw wires through the pulpit when I fitted it but unfortunately they seem to be jammed  which will mean unbolting the aft feet of the pulpit and possibly modifying the cable opening through the deck so that it lines up with the opening in the pulpit foot a bit better, but that will have to wait until the weather gets a bit warmer.










No comments:

Post a Comment