Thursday, June 16, 2016

Gotta sweat the small stuff.

Been a few weeks of small work. Filling and fairing. Finding spots that I missed even though I marked them for fairing. I’m fairly confident that this part of the deck painting project is pretty much done. Even so, without my lists I’d be lost.

Remember to do what?

Gotta have a list

The decks have been left alone since removing all the non-skid last fall so I spent a day or two vacuuming and cleaning. One item that never occurred to me is that all the empty screw holes, bolt holes and cutouts needed to have the sealant and butyl removed. That took an entire day.

Cleanup.

Chainplate cuts

Other items that I hadn’t considered would need attending to also. All the deck fill openings exhibited dried out core from previous water intrusion so I cleaned them up with the Dremel tool and filed them with Awlfair to seal them.

Cleaned, filled and curing.

Deck fill destruction

Keep the core dry

At the same time I became concerned about how the main hatch was going to be remounted. It’s only held in by large screws and has been out at least once before. I decided to fill the screw holes with West System and colloidal silica so that when I remount the hatch there will be a better purchase.

Sand and fair...

Redo the old screwholes

Another forgotten item was replacing the foamed-in filler for the starboard opening port. C&C used some sort of filler to fill the space between the cabin laminate and the interior liner. This had given up the ghost and fallen out. I worked up a small piece of wood and expoxied it into place.

Clamps are your friends.

Goop replacement piece

Attaching skins

With most of that taken care of I started getting things ready back at the shed. I pulled all the hatches and took them home. I serviced and prepped the compressor, added connectors to the new 3/8” air hose that I bought and started in on sanding, filling and fairing. There are those words again...

This should be the last of it.

First hatch prep curing

New work area.

Shed workstation

Some time back I had contacted a fellow C&C list member about buying a new Lewmar Ocean 60 hatch to replace the original Atkins & Hoyle hatch that I had stupidly destroyed removing it. The new hatch arrived early this week and I dry-fitted it to make sure that it would work and that I had prepped the area effectively prior to painting.

Looks like it will work well.

Prep for new hatch

New hatch positioning

With all the prep work close to being finished, I worked up my materials list, gave it to my buddy Charlie at Jennings and two days later I have, I hope, everything that I need to start in on painting the decks.

Awlgrip and 3M fanboy.

Christmas presents

Next step, attempt to be half-way decent spray painter. Oy!