Staging and Some Sunshine

First off, look, no tarp! The sun made a showing and I was able to climb around on the boat! I even left the tarp off for a couple of days! I won't complain about the heat because that seems a bit whiney after all the complaining about rain.

Last week's accomplishments:

• I ordered wood and built some staging. (Pictured above.) Very straigthforward - the long pieces are 6 feet, the short ones are 3 feet and there's a couple of hinges at the tops so they'll collapse and store against a wall. I bought 2 12' 2x10 pieces thinking I'd place them next to each other for a larger standing area, but I found them a bit too flexible for my taste. Adding my ladder under one of them stiffens it up really nicely, and lets me place the bases farther apart.
• I made 3 inch circles (4) to represent bases for a stern rail, taped them to the aft deck where there would be room under them for backing plates, and took measurements. I'll be ordering stern rails from Tops in Quality as soon as I can get the guts to send the email. ($564.50 for their cheap version with a slight modification plus shipping. Yikes!) The costs are mounting, but I feel pretty strongly that this is a safety feature needed for sailing with toddlers.
  
• Saturday, my sailing buddy Scott came over to help out. First off - he figured out my hanging coaming dilemma in about two seconds flat. The jerk. I'll post a picture as soon as I get back out there and take one.
• Next, we removed the chain plates from the side decks. Not too bad - only one bolt was rusted/corroded enough that it had to be broken to be removed. The chain plates were absolutely NOT water tight and there were plenty of signs to indicate water frequently enters through these areas, including some rotting plywood knees. A couple of the chain plates were bent, but all seemed pretty sound. Still, I'll be replacing them all and fixing the knees. I have one more to remove, the chain plate for the back stay, which has a stripped bolt that needs to be cut off.
• Next, I decided to try and determine where to start cutting the deck. First, I thunked around with a shot-filled mallet to try and determine the delaminated spots. There were obvious places (thud) and solid places (ping), but mostly, for me, it was guessing if it was more "thud" or "ping" on the inbetween spots. So I opted to drill exploratory holes in the deck to try and determine the areas I'll need to cut. Using my sharpie, I marked a few spots where wet core came out when I drilled. Then it occurred to me: "wet" does not mean "delaminated", nor does "delaminated" mean "wet". Hmmm... So, I got another beer, drilled a few more holes, and invited Scott for dinner.

More than ever I realize it's time to just shut up and start sawing. That's about it.

Yesterday, I raced home from work to cover everything again because of threatening thunderstorms. Nothing last night, but tonight, we got dumped on.

Stripping Varnish

The sun made an appearance today! Woo hoo!

Progress. In the rain, I finished putting up some shelves between the studs. They're small but they're a place to store things. I hung the anchor so I wouldn't trip over it when doing stuff at the workbench. I decided to live with the imperfect dangling coaming arrangement - it'll still work. Then, I it was time to tackle the varnish removal from the coamings.

I got a heat gun from Home Depot and dug up a couple of cabinet scrapers that had been given to me long ago and for some reason stayed in my wayward tool collection, and grabbed my trusty 9-in-1 tool. After some trial and error, the removal was pretty straight forward.

I clamped the coaming to keep if from moving, then, wearing thick work gloves (latex ones don't insulate too well...), I would aim the heat gun right at the spot I was intending to remove. The varnish would just start peeling off as I scaped. Worked pretty well. BTW, the red handled paint scrapers weren't worth the trouble it took to dig them up.

If you'll notice: the dangling coaming in the picture above is stripped and ready for sanding. The other one is partially done. I'm looking forward to varnishing them.

Garage Preparations

The idea is to hang the coamings upside down to enable me to get at both sides when everything is stripped off and it comes time to varnish, then to pull them up and out of the way while they dry. But, no matter what I tried, the end closest to where I pull on it would rise first. I added blocks to the ceiling to reduced friction, flipped the coaming around, and tried moving the eye bolts around to practically every combination of holes in the coaming. As I write this, I'm thinking I haven't tried a block on the coaming itself yet. It still seems like friction on that first attachment point on the coaming is the issue...

With more rain in the forecast for the weekend, I'm going to try and get some of this indoor stuff started. After shelves, the first order of business is to remove the winches from the winch pads so I can start stripping the coamings. I've got plenty of other brightwork to attend to as well. And I've literally got buckets of hardware from the decks which need to be sorted through.

Sigh...

Well, at least I'm getting the garage organized.