Painted, Turned Around, Some Engineering.

The hull is painted now. I finished sanding the original undercoat and then gave it another coat of white undercoat mixed with dark green topcoat about 50/50. Another very light sanding to get rid of the few flies and then 2 coats of International Paint's Donegal Green. I left the boat alone for a few days to let the paint harden and then fitted the rudder bracket under the skeg and a 10mm thick strip of HDPE (plastic) along the bottom of the keel. I merged the HDPE into a half round brass strip that curves around the forefoot and up the stem. With that done the boat was lowered back down to floor level. Here she is:

The boat is resting on a trolley so that it can be rolled out, turned around and rolled back in. The legs in the photo above are to stop it falling over sideways while the slings are removed and then replaced after the move.

I had 4 helpers to do the pushing, pulling and balancing so the move went fairly easily except that one of the wheels lost is solid rubber tyre as the boat was spun around. These cheap and cheerful hardware store wheels look substantial but are not very strong.

here's the boat back in the shed and on its supports so that I can work on the inside.

Inside the boat I started assembling the prop shaft, pulleys and electric motor. The shaft bearings are in place and it is all fitting together nicely.

That's a temporary floor and the rubber mats are padding for my knees!

Hatch Cover

Ten days ago I was away enjoying a few days sailing. On the last day I tried out the rope ladder that is supposed to make getting back on board possible; it is only a small sailing boat but has quite high freeboard. As expected the rope ladder idea isn't very good. When you put your foot on the bottom rung your foot goes under the boat and it requires a lot of upper body effort to counteract this. It was possible but I strainf all sorts of muscles in my body and arms! I will invent a better ladder!

When I got home and back to boat building the next job was to finish painting the outside of the hull. To make this easier I lifted the boat up onto two sawhorses. This was easy enough to do using a couple of chain blocks - no arm strength needed. Here it is:

The white undercoat needed a light sanding and you can see all the paraphernalia under the stern. I managed to do less than an hour before the clicking and grating in my shoulders and muscle pain made me stop. It is now a week later and I have just managed to do another half an hour on the sander. In the meantime I have been "resting" which is something that I am not good at.

To fill in the time (light duties) I finished the cover or lid for the access hatch in the stern deck. The hatch is there to allow access to the steering arrangements. The cover is 420mm outside diameter and I wanted to display the boat's name in it. Almost the hardest part of the job was deciding on a name! Not very original but I settled on "Lady Susan". This is a "gentleman's launch" and the gentleman often named the boat in honour of his wife so we have Lady xxxx. Susan was my late wife.

The outer ring is one piece of cedar. There is a 12mm thich plywood disc epoxied inside it and the inlaid pieces started out about 3mm thick before they were sanded flat. There about 60 pieces of inlay all cut out on my small CNC mill with a 1mm diameter end milling cutter. The timber came from the scrap box.

I also made a couple of name plates for the sides of the hull at the bow.

There are 3 of them because I made one as a test piece. It has a couple of imperfections so I made 2 more, neither of which were as good as the first one!