Making a maple cutting board for Oceanus - total joy; finding a machine screw - total PITA! |
Head painter Virginia spent hours on her hands and knees for the last few weekends sanding and stripping old paint off the decks. I've also put in my time filling, fairing and sanding. The part of the project that had us concerned was getting the old paint out of the molded-in pattern on the non-skid parts of the deck. The original baby-blue non-skid was painted at least twice (grey and then white) by previous owners. The paint filled in the pattern in the non-skid rendering it non non skid.
The deck in the bottom of the photo is stripped and ready for painting. |
The payoff was this weekend as we finished painting the deckhouse and water channels on the deck. It looks great! (I forgot my camera. Sorry. I'll snap some photos later.) We thought doing the glossy parts first would be easiest when it came time to tape them off before we applied the non-skid, which must be done with a roller.
A fitting session for the new dodger. Notice the color of the dodger and the bulwarks. That is no accident. |
This brings up something that I've complained of before when I was building Ravn, my 19-foot faering. It seems like much of my time building (or rebuilding) boats is spent hunting, gathering and making the many specialized parts required for the projects. These can be pretty esoteric and hard to find.
Sometimes it's easy and fun. Like making a maple cutting board to fit over the stove top. The wood for the cutting board was kicking around my shop for longer than a decade just waiting for a project. I knew exactly where it was and it was just the right size. Cutting to rough size, jointing the edges and glue up took about an hour, even counting mixing up a small batch of epoxy. The next day I sanded, cut to final size, bull-nosed the edges, gave it a final sand and ragged on some cutting-board oil -- maybe two hours. That's a total of three fun hours on something I know we will enjoy looking at and using nearly every day for years. (I never tire of the beautiful figure in tiger-stripped maple.)
Finding the machine screw for the cleat took days. First checking with all the local sources, then scouring the internet and catalogs until I found one. Topped off by a four-hour round-trip to Portland, and shelling out nearly 20 bucks, because you can't just buy one. All for a little, but critical, part that we hardly notice.
This frustrating, time-consuming, expensive crap is why projects on a boat are twice as expensive and take three times as long as you think they will.
Oh Brandon, i feel terrible! I havn't been watching the blogs like i should. Next time call! I probably have the exact machine screw right in the shop. I fact, i think that i saw them just the other day! 3x5/16 ss slot machine screws.....did you check fastenal, out of curiousity?
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