A Solid Weekend’s Work

Knocked a lot of things off the To Do list this weekend.

1. Sanded the bottom: God I hate that job. A 38′ slooop with a 6’8″ keel has a lot of surface area to sand and wipe down with acetone. Anyway, that’s behind me now.

Whenever I do this job, I never seem to be sufficiently covered and the blue bottom paint dust gets everywhere. And I mean literally EVERYWHERE!

When I got home and jumped into the shower, the dust had penetrated through my jeans and underwear. All I can say is that my privates looked like I had been auditioning for a porno version of Avatar.

2. Fixed that bloody seacock. I blogged about the trials and tribulations caused by a seized seacock. I still couldn’t get it to budge on Saturday. I was getting to the point where a replacement seemed on the cards.  Something I was trying to avoid.

A bit of tenacity paid off. I gave it another shot on Sunday and it budged. I was then able to apply a technique I learned about on the awesome Compass Marine web site. This involved lapping compound, a mysterious black goo that is essentially liquid emory paper. By applying the technique advised by Compass, I restored the offending seacock so that it now opens and closes with the push of a finger.

I then did a lap of honor by servicing the engine raw water in-take seacock.

3. Rebedded a winch and two clutches. I have a small crack on the coach house and I believe it’s letting water into the core. Eek! The crack was most likely caused by a poorly bedded deck fitting letting water in which then freezes and cracks outwards.

Anyhoo, I once again applied the bedding technique recommended by the Mighty Compass Marine using butyl tape. Below are photos showing steps in the process. There are much better ones here where RC Collins of Compass Marine explains the process in more detail and applies butyl a lot better than I do.

In order:

Photo 1 – Get some butyl tape. It’s vastly superior to 5200 aka the Devil’s Glue

Photo 2 – Take off the deck fittings and clean away all residue

Photo 3 – Clean the crap out of the fitting. I was shocked at how much gunk gets under a supposedly well-bedded fitting.

Photo 4 – Apply butyl tape. Mine looks like crap but it’s efficacious all the same

Photo 5 – Wrap the screw head in butyl thus

Photo 6 – Screw the bizatch down.

Photo 7 and 8 – Cut away the squeezed out excess

4. Greasing The Winches: For a grand finale I serviced all five winches.

I would like to note that I am not now and have never considered myself to be what you might call “handy” but the motivation of not paying someone to do a job is strong. If I can learn how to do his stuff, any knucklehead can – blue privates and all!