Small victories

Two days for two people (thanks Germain!), that’s what it took to remove the remaining 4 hatch boxes and prepare for Jean-Pierre’s next visit.  Not many jobs are less appealing than grinding old metal on this boat:  You finish the day looking like a chimney sweep, you have to wash your hair twice and Jean-Francois, who works in short sleeves, has a myriad of minuscule burns on his forearms from the red hot metal that sprays from the grinder.  Let’s say it’s nice when it’s done.  

Then we got to a more encouraging job:  Reassembly of the wood frames for windows and hatches.  Piece by piece, they’ll almost be all saved. 

First, we sand and scrape the joints that swelled with humidity and we remove the old rotten screws (not stainless!).  Then we reassemble with new temporary screws and once we are sure that the frame is solid and the shape is respected, we drill a hole next to each screw for a wood peg, we unscrew everything, apply glue, reassemble and insert the pegs.  End of phase one.  The next day, we remove the temporary screws and drill multiple holes, 3 on average in each joint for more pegs.  The latter will  total 16 per frame, very solid; and no mechanical fasteners.  

  It takes an average of 2 hours of prep time for a 30 minutes gluing session which can include 3 to 8 pieces.  It will have taken 4 days to do them all but it’s great work because we go from a masking-tape wound burn-pile of oak to actual windows.

We also took a few hours to drill the holes in the newly welded steel plates around the windows.  This required bringing back the old acrylic windows to use as templates.

We are now waiting for the sandblast guy and a good weather window.  Let’s hope it won’t be too long!