Are you sitting 'Comfortably'

[Tim Noyce]

Well, I'm a bit late starting this years 'Winter Boatbuilding' project as suffering from acute lack of garage syndrome means that I am a fair weather boat tinkerer. List of jobs on the 'to-do' list include:-

- New gantry and transom cross piece. (it will be a fixed single skin arrangement, for standard rudder)
- New self tacker arrangement. (will be borrowing Dave Chings nice mould for the track attachment)
- Stump removal from the boat and mast extended to close the gap. (I have done the mast lamination, just needs tidying and need to install the new mast foot/step which is being machined this week)
- Leaky crack in the floor under the foredeck needs sorting so it doesn't fill up when sat in the dinghy park.
- New 'low maintenance' paint. (Bens design was incredible and I don't have the talent to reproduce something of that calliber, but it was a nightmare to touch up as it comprised at least 3 different shades of grey, of which none of the tins of paint seemed to correlate to!)
- New kicker and cunningham control line systems lead out to be easier to use.

The general thoughts behind the mods are to 'simplify and add lightness' so if something isn't adding easy speed or making the boat easy to sail then it is being removed. The boat will be club sailed primarily and so having a boat which is easy to live with and fun to sail is more important than chasing the latest tech on such an old boat.

The boat is now at my Grandads house so have access to his garage, and hopefully we've had our last cold snap for the year so that I can get this done pretty sharpish. So after a day of chopping and sanding my hands are now 'Comfortably Numb' from excessive powertool use, but going by the old adage of things have to get worse before they get better... I must be on the right track!

[roland_trim]

Looking good Tim. Great to hear you are following the golden rule of hacking a boat around.

Wield no power tools until you are entirely sure you have the logistics and motivation to get the boat back on the water again.


Apologies that mold is in my garage ATM. However, Beans also started her return to the water over the weekend and she is currently in our garage. So probably easiest to deliver it via Tom and dance class?

[ade white]

i see two boats are in the process... how much weight do you think you have lost out of the boats by taking out the side tanks? i thought of doing it when i took all the grip off sweet dreamzzz but, in the end ended up making it comfortable to sit on! May be persuaded though...
will they both be ready for Weston?

[roland_trim]

Beans mod is purely to address some cracking that appeared after her mast exploded. Weight will be about the same dry, but hopefully she will now not try to drink the Solent. As I want my garage back, she will be a quick fix, but not sure if Tom is targeting Weston.

[Tom K]

I can't make Weston but am keen to start club racing again ASAP. So hopefully the repair will be done double speed.

[Tim Noyce]

Numb is also not going to be ready for Weston. With the boat not being at my house it means that I can't work on it 'full time' but I did manage another 2 hours sanding last night as the weather was good.

Quick question: What grade of sandpaper do people favour for paint removal? I am currently using 60 or 80 grit and that seems to dispatch of it quite well, but wondered if anyone had tried going any rougher? Is 40 worth a bash or is that likely to graze the surface too much? I want rid of the paint asap as there seem to be quite a few layers in places on the deck so they need to go. The hull itself is female moulded so pretty fair, so it's just a case of paint removal rather than needing to fair the skin.

[roland_trim]

For bulk removal 40 worked OK on BS.

First few strokes are scratchy then it "beds in" and works a treat. We used the "clean" paper where the paint was thickest for a few strokes and then moved back to the bit we were working on...

[Hayley_Trim]

Personally I find the 40 pretty brutal. Feel a bit safer with 60.

[Tim Noyce]

So, after being thoroughly inspired to get the boat back out on the water after an epic sail in Atum Bom with Ben on Saturday I set the day aside on Sunday to get some more work done on the boat. As you will see from the photos a few more bits 'fell off' and so now the boat is without a foredeck and the king post is coming out too. A decision was made to remove the foredeck in order to improve access to the top of the blister tank to perform the repair, and there are also a couple of hatches which

The sanding continues to take forever, but I am sure it will be worth it in the end!

The next step is to rebuild the transom with the new gantry, and also to repair the crack in the floor... oh, and plenty more sanding!

[Neil C.]

Go for it Tim. It's amazing how these apparently straightforward boat-fixing jobs always turn into something bigger.

[Tim Noyce]

Agreed... I think that is it for chopping stuff off now otherwise we'll never be back on the water. Just got to make sure that the bits that go back on are lighter than the bits which came off... and stronger!

[ade white]

Looking decidedly uncomfortable and very numb at the moment! Is there anything else to come off! Looking good though and we found having big holes in the foredeck good for Joe to sit in in the light stuff.
Is your mastfoot on top of the kingpost and does this mean you may go up to 05 rules as well? pm me, I have an idea!!!

[Tim Noyce]

Another full day of sanding complete and I'm happy to say that there isn't too much more left to come off the deck now. Resorted to 40 grit on the orbital and just kept changing it regularly to keep it cutting through. Think we'be uncovered every colour in the rainbow of paint now so it should be a bit lighter once we've finished. Got an adventure race tomorrow morning but if we're back in time I might treat myself to another couple of hours getting dusty!

Few pics as the boat stands now...

[Tim Noyce]

So, did a bit more sanding.. yawn.

[Tim Noyce]

Not a huge amount to update since the last installment. I have since given up many more hours of sanding and I am pleased to announce that there is now no paint left on the boat. I emptied the vac the other day and there is quite a sizeable amount of paint dust in the bag so it feels like it was worth the effort. I chopped some more bits off too... the wheelie bars looked at me the wrong way so they came off as I decided that without a T-foil they probably were just adding weight although I will miss being able to hang onto them when turning the boat over as they were nice handles.

The sanding uncovered some shortcuts made by previous owners where laminate had been bonded to paint (tut tut tut) so this had to be rectified! The beam extensions were the main culprit and so I sanded through the glass in order to remove the offending paint and have since re'filleted the join and we laid up a 2000x200mm strip of 200g twill down each side to replace the lost glass. This should also stiffen up the wings a bit as there had been some crazing on the inside of the deck where they were marginally flapping.

Another area of attention was to back fill some voids which featured in the hull skin. The outer glass skin is in perfect condition having been made using the female mould back in 1991. The hull is almost perfectly fair and features zero filler so I am happy that she will be nice and light, sadly whilst sanding we uncovered a few voids where the foam hadn't bonded properly to the outer skin. ( I speculate that the skin was bonded down and then held down using weights /bags of sand rather than being vacced down and so there will have been areas where it didn't sit flush) These areas were painstakingly drawn round with marker pen and then drilled top and bottom so that we could go ahead and fill them. Saturday morning involved batches of super light epoxy and microballoon filler, a syringe and somewhere in the region of 47 little peel ply patches to cover the holes. We kept putting filler into the void until it squidged out of the bottom hole! (interestingly with the clear glass you could see the void being filled as the filler expanded in the gap!) These have since been sanded and back filled to keep it nice and fair. I think in total we will have added in the region of 200g worth of filler (some of which will have been sanded off again) but overall the boat now sounds a lot stiffer as hopefully the skins will be working a bit better!

Should hopefully be turning the boat back the right way up again on Friday (busy schedule this week so that is the next day we can get back to the boat) so that we can make a start on the under foredeck floor repairs to make the hull sound to keep the water out! Sadly no photos this time, but will update on Friday!