So I managed another Thursday off work 🙂
Two long days working on two projects. First priority, our two Canpa deck hatches, both have been leaking and both had very crazed acrylic so that you couldn’t see out.
Getting them off wasn’t too difficult. The big job has been cleaning all the various sealant off them. In fact we have only managed this for the hatch that goes above the aft cabin. Took hours and hours of coating with “Detak” (chewing gum remover) and scraping with an acrylic scraper (to avoid damaging the aluminium). Plus a metal cleaner once all the sticky stuff was off. As the weather has been beautiful and hot we were hiding out of the sun under the boat for this work.
We have a challenge with the hatch over the saloon. The hatches use 3 pins to make the hinge. These are stainless steel and there has been electrolytic corrosion between them and the aluminium. Corroded aluminium (is that Aluminium Oxide) is 50% larger than Aluminium so the corrosion, at the minimum, locks everything in. At worst it can split the aluminium open. Ours hasn’t reached the worst and we are hoping we can drill the pins out with the dremmel.
The aft hatch was all complete, apart from the acrylic itself at about 6:30pm (Friday) when it started to rain. Fortunately, by about 8pm it had stopped and we were able to fit it.
The acrylic is held in place by a special 3M tape. It requires over 21 degrees C and pressure to set. Hence, all the things tied down on top of it. We ran heaters in the cabin until after 10:30pm which got the temperature up to over 28 degrees.
After the hatch is sitting on the tape we added sealant around the edges, hence the masking tape in the pictures.
We have temporarily boarded up the saloon hatch to take the frame home for Dremmeling.
We have also been able to make progress, on what is at the moment, a huge open space, that is the main bilge (where water collected to be pumped out), the cockpit locker (storage for sails, ropes, fenders etc), the motor space (above the bilge), and the outside edge of the corridor.
So lots of sanding (no pictures of me dressed in my beautiful outfit of all in one white suit, full face mask with filters and ear defenders).
Then vacuuming it all. Our Draper workshop vacuum has been brilliant for all these jobs (we bought it when doing up the house for our sons). Used it on wet mode to get rainwater out of the bilge (we have a lot of holes in the cockpit at the moment from the old engine controls). The deep section of the bilge is about 1m deep so very inaccessible. We taped a small paint roller to the end of a broom to paint it.
With no more oil, diesel or petrol on the boat this should stay nice and clean now.
Lots of rain overnight and the new hatch over our cabin didn’t leak 🙂 Good news as the hatch has been our biggest refurbishment of old fittings so far. As such it has been time consuming but at a huge cost saving (under £200 total for both hatches compared to about £1,100 for new). All the parts for the hatch refurbishment were from Hadlow Marine (who also supplied all our windows).
We probably still have at full day for both of us to get the other hatch prepared and fitted (providing I can get the the old hinge pins out).
Very pleased with this weeks progress 🙂
Sustainable Sailing 