Anchor Windlass Shelf

I’ve been working on adding a Lewmar Pro-Series 1000 horizontal anchor windlass. Although my wife often insists on bringing up the anchor I figured it was time to have a proper anchoring system for the boat. I didn’t want the windlass to be sitting proud on the deck so I took some measurements of the anchor locker and worked up a rough CAD of a support structure inside the anchor locker and below the locker cover.

Design:

After purchasing a sheet of 1/4” FRP flat stock and 6’ of 1/4” tube from McMaster-Carr I made some 2X4 and plywood mockups to ensure that things fit up. In addition to supporting and bearing some of the loads of the chain, the port side of the shelf will be used to mount a deck/anchor chain wash-down pump and hose.

 

After getting the mockups correct I cut the FRP and did some dry-fitting. Good thing because I was always finding errors and mistakes in my design. 

With the parts cut and ready to go I started glassing in the transverse tube to the sides of the hull. The ends were fillet bonded and left to cure. When the fillet bond epoxy was set I applied fiberglass cloth using a mixture of West System epoxy and colloidal silica. 

 The flat shelf of 1/4” FRP used to support the windless and wash down pump were then epoxied to the cross-beam and the struts tabbed and glassed to the bar, the shelf and then glassed to the bulkhead to add additional strength to the structure. Before doing any glass work though, I drilled the mounting holes for the windlass and associated wiring rather than deal with it after the structure was in place. Pretty tight fit in the anchor locker.

Dry fit of the windlass after windlass shelf installed:

Final sanding and painting will be done next year when the decks are repainted.

 

 

Teak Companionway Trim Replacement

Another catch-up post on work that I did in my shed during the winter. 

The teak surrounding the companionway that the hatchboards fit in was in rough shape from the day we bought the boat. Now that I am repainting the decks it was time to fix the problem. The trim was so splintered and worn away that the hatch board rattled constantly.

So, $185.00 worth of teak later I was ready to start. Yes, if you look in the following picture you will see twice as much teak as necessary to replace the trim. I tend to make mistakes no matter how much I measure and measure again and, well, that’s where I’ll leave it.

Original teak trim and new stock: 

After taking lot’s of measurements and templates I practiced quite a bit using 2X4 pine stock. I’m no woodworker and this was my first important project where I used the Ryobi table saw I bought off Craigslist. And sure enough, I made a mistake with one of the trim pieces. That went into the teak leftover bin for future projects.

Teak stock, table saw, original trim and pine test piece:

After much sawing, routing and dado cuts the trim was just about ready for dry-fitting. One of the tricky parts is that sailboats pretty much don’t have a square/straight line in them so each piece needed to be hand carved and fitted to the companionway. Although my final shaping was not perfect and some of the joints were not perfectly flush they came out pretty close and will have to do. I’m not trying to build a Hinckley.

Old and new trim places waiting for installation after the deck is repainted:

While I was working on the trim project I did some side work on the teak handrails for the companionway and the exterior cabin top handrails. I put around 10 to 15 coats of gloss varnish depending on location of the piece.  The interior overhead handrails received 12 coats of satin finish varnish. All are now sitting in the rafters of my shed waiting for installation. Some where in the future...

Cabin top and companionway handrails:

Interior handrails drying:

Starts and stops.

I’ve not posted in quite some time because my basic plan for adding updates to the blog was to post after some major job or task was completed. That plan isn’t going to work.

It’s become clear that because a number of factors have conspired to drag the rebuild process out I have decided to just start posting as projects progress.

The plans for this summer had me just about ready to start painting the decks. Forget that. The boat would have to come out of the water so that the mast could be pulled, the rudder shaft repaired and the keel dropped, cleaned up and the infamous C&C Smile fixed.

Now the boat is out of the water and sitting forlornly in the yard along with a whole of bunch of neglected yard queens. Technically the boat is scheduled to have the hull painted over the winter but given that a friend’s J40 was scheduled for the same treatment and went in the shed in November of last year and didn’t get completed and splashed until early this September, well, I’m pretty sure that we can say “Goodbye Summer 2016 Sailing Season…”. Eh, no worries.

Much of the slip in the schedule is on my part. Despite my delusions of cranking through projects on a daily basis this summer I’ve found that other demands have eaten up much of my time. Now, none of those demands were or are onerous, mostly motorcycle related fixes and trips, getting the dock wiring repaired so I could splash the Mako 261 and get her up to speed. And traveling. Lot’s and lot’s of traveling. We spent 10 days in Napa, CA and 2 weeks in Slovenia and Croatia, one week of that trip sailing the Adriatic off the Croatian coast. A week-long trip out to Moab in mid-September to do some dual-sport riding with my brother and old friends. In early October I was off to the Dominican Republic for some yearly volunteer work. Late October is filled with helping my sister-in-law with her yearly 100-mile endurance ride that she organizes. Kinda punches holes in my optomistic  schedule.

Anyway, I’ll start posting entries of projects underway. For the time being, some more non-sailing stuff.

Moab off-road riding: