Help Alan Retire at 85

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2N2W (too nice to work).
The hatch we dissected yesterday was glued back together. Next it will be sanded smooth and the seams refilled.


We noticed a couple of antennas that are in danger of expiring. When the coating goes and the bare fiberglass is showing, it is time to do something. A bit of painting goes a long way towards squeezing some extra life out of them.


Kevin removed the name off the Viking yesterday so he could finish up the compounding and polishing of the hull. He is getting a bit backed up at this point and needs to keep moving.


We have located new bearings for the Viking and should be able to eliminate the vibration problem the boat was having.


The owner suspected some sort of leaking on the holding tank of this boat. The dripping is actually corrosion from the bronze thru-hull - most likely from salt water being splashed up when the boat is in the water. The best fix would be to replace it with a Marelon or similar plastic thru-hull.


A similar reaction will probably occur on waterline thru-hulls that loose their paint like the ones below. They won't be quite as bad if they are painted inside. The problem with painted thru-hulls is the maintenance required to keep them painted.

Spring like weather continues, and there seems to be no end to the work in sight. Friday was spent predominately on the Viking. There was a long survey list in addition to the upgrades the buyer wanted. One problem was a non-working winch in the dinghy well. No problem, probably just a switch. But getting access to the wiring was a problem, plus a lot of the equipment on the boat is 24V (but not all). We did find the problem, but not in the time we thought it would take.


There were a couple of cracked hoses - no surprise here, one should always be inspecting hoses. What I did notice that on many boats, you don't have to look too far to find rust!


We were supposed to change the toe-in a bit on the rudders but found the teflon bearings were shot and will need to be replaced.


I showed a deck box lid last week that needed some revamping. The frame just popped right off in our hands. We are going to rebed that with an adhesive, sand the entire lid and recaulk. We did find steel nails in the corners that must have been an attempt to make a temporary repair. We had thought about eliminating the teak, but if you look at the top, it is raw fiberglass and would be quite time intensive to get it to a finished product.

Just another day in paradise. We keep getting more calls for new service work and haven't even gotten close to finishing the work we need done by spring. Could this be the economy improving?

Carlos, in addition to his painting tasks, has been doing some house cleaning on a few boats - specifically, cleaning mold and mildew from lockers and lazarettes. Some of these boats will require vents. If you are storing wet lines or you are finding moisture in any of your seats or lazarettes you should have vents installed to allow them to breathe to eliminate mold problems.


Pat got his engine mounts in yesterday. The engine will need to be aligned when the boat gets back in the water.


This is the hydraulic wedge that lifts the engine while the mounts are replaced:


Laird determining the best place to locate the gauges for the bilge counter and alarm. The owner told us the instrument between Laird's fingers is non-functional, so we are going to remove it and install the gauges on a black panel.


I think we should bring back "Anything Can Happen Day" on Fridays -