Many Hands Make Lite Work!

SHIP'S LOG:

     It is always a good thing to have help when your are undertaking projects on your boat. You have someone to help, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to make suggestions, some one to do the actual work and someone to blame if things come-a-cropper!

     Josh the yard electrician tackled the wind generator problem. As you know, to me electricity is all voodoo and I avoid dealing with it as much as possible. he went through the manual and all the steps and determined that the problem must be in the generator unit way up the top of the mizzen mast. The yard had a cherry picker so he did what work he could up there before resorting to calling the manufacturer to see if there was anything he missed  and/or whether or not he had to take the unit off and ship it to them for repair.  He got no response fro m the company but left messages and hopefully we will get a call back sooner than later. Still trying to figure out how the gremlins are stealing volts from the batteries. There is a slow but steady drain and it has everyone scratching their heads.

     While all that fun was going on, I was busily ripping off 11 feet or so of the port caprail. It was the section that got battered and beaten and was being held in place with wood filler and Gorilla glue. It looked awful and was structurally unsound and had to go. My good friend Skip got me some very fine oak  as a replacement. While the Gorilla glue wasn't all that good at holding the wood together it was dynamite in holing the wood to the fiberglass. It too quite the effort to get it off. In addition, I had to locate and remove the screws that were actually holding the caprail to the boat. I had to find the bungs that sealed and hid their locations along the rail, dig the bungs out, clean the slot on the screws with a dental pick so that I could slot in a screw drive and back them out. Sounds simple but it wasn't. The rail had been whacked enough times so that the screws in the rail were bent and just wouldn't back out. I had to chisel-out the wood around the screws( teak is rather hard) and then attach a pair of vice-grips and so spin out the screws. Next came filling the old screw holes and any voids along the rail. Once that was done, I had to fit an 8 foot straight piece of oak along an 11 foot piece of curved rail. I had to cut and scarf the pieces to fit the curve and though I was 3ft or so short, it went well. I see if Skip has some more wood to finish the job.

     Like I said, many hands make lite work. They also make more work as well. Friend Fred came by, and after suggesting several additional projects for me to tackle, took over repositioning the water-maker to the rear cabin.  There was not a lot of room to do the work so I left Fred handle it, which he would rather have happen anyway. He spent lots of time expressing him admiration of the technical design of the system and making derogatory comments on its previous installation. Typical Fred, God bless him. One thing, if Fred tackles a job, it will be done right. Good friend that he is, he left me all the grunt work to finish up.

    Before Fred was having fun in the aft locker and Josh was having fun 50 feet in the air at the wind generator, in addition to the caprail I was dealing with, Fred and I tackled the Main halyard winch on the mast. It has been non-functioning as long as I have owned the boat but it currently serves no necessary purpose. I use it as an "aide" in dealing with the mainsail out-haul, but basically that's it. The main halyard goes up once in the spring and we don't need the power of the winch to get it up. So while it would be nice to be able to "grind" that particular winch, it isn't really necessary.  It can't be repaired "in situ" as it can't be completely dismantled "in situ."  As a result, we want to take it off the mast, but the five SS machine bolts that affix it to the mast are "unmoving." The mast is aluminum and the bolts stainless steel and when the two meet, in the present of moisture and with a little time, corrosion sets in. And since these bolts have been in place since the mast went into the boat some 34 years ago, there was serious need to break the corrosion. However, nothing we tried worked and before we stripped the heads, I cleaned and greased the winch and reassembled it. It is a low priority project for another day.