I thought today would be the day that I started, and possibly completed, the last part of the epoxy application that required me to have the boat uncovered. Alas, halfway through the day the weather forecast changed, rain was forecast and it was correct. The rain, not much and intermittent, began shortly afterwards.
I need a warm dry day to apply the epoxy and then, between six and twenty-four hours later, another warm dry period to apply the second coat. The forecast indicates that this might happen tomorrow or Friday.
So for today, I needed to find other tasks that can be carried out in the workshop.
The first task became obvious when the ten silicon bronze screws I ordered a few days ago arrived in the post.
I put in three of the screws using the holes I had already drilled but widened a little to suit No.10 screws.
When tightened down such that the tang touches the stock, the other side stands clear of the surface. This explains why there was so much filler on both tangs.
It also meant that the screw holes were misaligned. The solution to this was to loosen off the three screws, allowing the fitting to move around, partially screw in the screws on the side shown and then tighten them down carefully, but not too tight.
I used a screwdriver bit in a brace for this after finding out that the cordless screwdriver slipped out too often and partially damaged the slot in the screw head. With these things costing around £1 each when you include the postage, damaging them was not something I wanted to do if I could avoid it.
Here the screws are loose on one side…
…and a little loose on the other and as you can see, the fit is much better.
I’ve left it like that for the moment whilst I decide whether to put in a filler piece of thin wood, to use the Sikaflex sealant or just to tighten the screws up carefully and not bother with any kind of filler at all.
At the moment I’m tending towards the Sikaflex.
After that I started a task that I have been putting off for over a year now, since Shoal Waters first arrived and was put into the Hay Barn. I took out a lot of the bits and pieces that came with her, put them into two plastic boxes by her stern and then left them there.
They have needed to be sorted out since them and today I finally got around to doing just that. Well, the start of that.
I sorted the items out into three piles. rubbish, keep and belongs to Tony (the previous owner), reading glasses, tin whistle and the like. The spiders were put outside.
There was a lot of rubbish.
What you can see in the photo above is the non-rubbish stuff. This will need to be further sorted in other piles which include “keep to go back onto the boat”, “keep but don’t put back on the boat” and “what the heck is that for?”. There may be other categories, but those are the ones I can think of for now.
That orange ring, by the way, is not a life ring, it’s a toilet seat to put on the top of a bucket. The bucket was not part of the inventory!
Time for a cup of tea.
I went out around 20:00 hours to feed the outdoor cat, close up the workshop and generally check around the property, something I do every evening, and there was a heavy dew forming already. The sky was clear and you could feel the chill in the air.
It will be a damp start to the day tomorrow.