So it’s 1 January, Fly relaunching year, and the refit continues apace…
Last Thursday (27 December) we got the engine back into the boat (handy things, six-part mainsheets!), and Twig got it bolted down and connected to the new battery cables on Saturday:
The day we did the engine lift, we also managed to fit new Vetus mushroom vents to replace the tired original vent lights, where the transparent part of one was already cracked/leaking (from memory perhaps from a physical blow?) and the other surely just a matter of time:
Saturday also saw a wee hiccup to the interior lining programme when we cut a piece of carpet to line the heads deckhead and started gluing it up there, only to discover that light was shining through it in the most unpleasantly uneven mottled mix of semi-translucent GRP deck and intended carpet white-grey! So we took it straight down again to ponder a solution, which pretty well had to be blocking the light with paint. It was a surprise because we’re getting next to no light through the already-lined topsides, but the decks have different thickness and composition and it’s taken me two coats of grey primer to achieve 100% coverage, doing the second coat with no light in the boat so I could track down all the ‘leaks’, and adding about half a kilo of otherwise pointless weight in the process. The finished lining will be the lighter grey of the wasted piece visible bottom left of the first photo:
Now, you might wonder why we hadn’t noticed the problem before we got to the glue, but we were working from a paper template and knew the piece would fit, so hadn’t thought to hold it up dry. As to whether I’m really happy with ‘next to no light through the already-lined topsides’, well, yes… it is almost none and will be none when I get the (exterior) topsides painted next year or the one after, so no need for more paint in the boat there!
The new stereo is also fitted (that’s just the corner of the protective film looking a bit funny at its top right corner) and, after long deliberation about what speakers to fit where when space for them is tight, I’ve decided to build custom enclosures for 4-inch round full-range units at the top corners of the main bulkhead (where I used to have smaller, plastic car-speaker-pod-type things). What I’ve designed to fit the space (which really stops at the starboard-side grab handle) luckily comes out at near as dammit the optimum 2-litre volume for unported enclosures for the units I’ve ordered, and should be quite straightforward to build from 6mm plywood:
The battery box is ready to go back in after restoring from probably the most water-damaged visible wood we’ve kept to something semi-respectable. While some of the staining (small black marks) resisted oxalic acid and wire brushing, I’m happy enough with the result including my nice round inset piece where there used to be a misshapen ex-socket hole in its aft face:
But refitting the battery box isn’t just about the box itself when support rails for the cabin sole and exposed areas of the keel bolts and their plates needed recoating first (these metal parts also needing cleaning to recoat). So that’s got done alongside the deckhead paint job, although the keel bolt/plate job’s spread from the old year to the new after I didn’t think to thicken the resin first time and had to revisit that today:
The new diesel filler is also in, with the battery box first on the agenda for tomorrow.