Projects Complete (sort of)

Deltaville, VA
NoLL

Tarwathie's new red, white, and blue color scheme.

For the past week, I didn't write much on the blog. I've been saving it up until our projects were finished. Now we're finished and my inbox is overflowing with complaints and inquiries from blog readers.

Also, just a few minutes ago I opened a can of fogger insecticide in the boat. We had an infestation of fruit flies. I can't return to the boat for 2 hours so that leaves time to blog.

Libby is fine. She never did get a black eye or a bruise from my sock. Thank goodness.

We could have finished and splashed (i.e. put the boat back in the water) on Friday but we decided instead to wait until Monday. It's a good thing. After deciding, I heard on the local radio that the Gilmerton Bridge in Norfolk would be closed for maintenance from Friday evening until Monday morning. That is the only draw bridge we must pass under to get to the Dismal Swamp. If we had arrived there Friday night and learned that we would have to wait 2.5 days for it to open I would have been furious.

So, what have we been doing? Here's a list of the things we accomplished this week.

Propeller: We have a Max Prop brand propeller. More than just a piece of metal, it has internal gears that allow it to feather automatically. Complexity means maintenance. The propeller needs to be greased. We squirt grease in with a grease gun until there is no room for water to get in. That can only be done when we are on the hard.

I also found that two of the four screws that hold the propeller together were missing. Ay ay! If all the screws came out, the propeller would just fall off and disappear into Davy Jones' Locker. I replaced the missing screws and secured them with cotter pins. I sure hope that holds.

I polished the propeller. Now it gleams like polished brass as it should. That helps propeller efficiency, but only for a few months until it pick up slime once again. There are special antifouling paints for propellers, but most people don't use them. Perhaps next time I'll give it a try.

We also replaced the zinc that goes on the end. If you remember, about a year ago I whined on the blog about breaking off a zinc screw while changing the zinc under water. I fretted about having to haul out to fix it. In the end, I let it go and fastened the zinc with two screws instead of the normal three. It worked OK. Indeed, that zinc lasted a whole year, longer than average.

Now was the time to get the old screw out. I bought a so-called screw extractor tool. Then, I was supposed to drill out the core of the old screw and insert the screw extractor. It went badly. I broke three cobalt drill bits trying to drill the hole. Then, when I inserted the extractor its tip broke off in the hole. The extractor's metal is much harder than the screws so I can't drill that out. To fix the whole mess will require removing the whole propeller with an acetylene torch and taking it to a machine shop, probably for a week or more. I didn't want to do that now; so for the next year, I'll have only two screws once again. Perhaps we'll haul out again in one year rather than two.

Dinghy: We remounted the oar bracked which kept falling off. We fixed (hopefully) the crack that was allowing water to leak in. We used epoxy resin to do that. We also mounted a new pair of oars and oar locks. The blade on the old oar had split. Our new oars are 7'6" long, compared to 7' for the old ones. We hope that the extra 6" will make a big difference in rowing efficiency.

Hull: We put on three coats of antifouling bottom paint. That was straight forward. However, as the boatyard guy helped us to move the jackstands so that we could paint the spots covered by the jackstands, he said, "You have some spots of bare fiberglass showing through. You should put on primer paint before the bottom paint." Darn! I had just covered over most of the bare spots without using primer. Nothing like being told that you did it wrong just when it's too late. Sigh.

Deck: We repainted the non-skid areas of the top decks once more. What a big disaster that is!!! I'll write a special blog about that soon.

Hull and deck: I used gel coat repair stuff on the many small dings and gouges in the fiberglass. Poor Tarwathie has suffered lots of bumps and scrapes in the past 5 years. I don't think we are less cautious than most boaters but we do seem to pick up more dings. Then we used rubbing compound to clean the surfaces and two coats of wax to protect it. Tarwathie looks much better cosmetically.

Mechanical: I repacked the stuffing box using dripless packing for the first time. If it proves to be truly dripless, we may achieve a totally dry bilge for the first time ever. Many other boats have dry bilges but we never did.

Electrical: I converted our two fluorescent light fixtures in the main cabin to LED. I did it in a DIY manner using strips of warm color LEDs. See the picture. The actual conversion was easy.



Now, our main cabin lights are 100% LED; both white and red for night use while at sea. Eacg fluorescent light used 7 watts of power. The LED replacements use only 1.5 watts, and they make more light. Since energy consumption is a very big deal for us, LEDs are a major improvement. We'll feel freer to use overhead lights liberally.

Next up: Does that bring us to the bottom of our to-do list? Hardly, we still have a lot of exterior varnish work to do, interior varnish, and a little bit of interior painting to do. Actually reaching the bottom of the to-do list must be a warning sign of the Apocalypse.