Tuesday, March 4, 2014

The Sky is Falling

There is no such thing as a simple repair on a boat. Our lights in the main salon (our living room) began working intermittently. A short in the wire? Simple, right? No, it's a boat, nothing is simple. The wiring for the lights runs in the ceiling under the vinyl headliner. We have to remove many teak trim pieces and cut back the vinyl. This is ok because we can re-staple the headliner under the trim pieces. We spent a lot of time talking about replacing the headliner, it really should be done. This added two or three new projects to the list. You have to draw the line somewhere! We decided, for now we will put the old headliner back in place.


The sky is not falling, but living with THIS mess is not fun!


With the headliner pulled back we gain access to all the nuts and bolts holding the deck hardware; blocks and line guides. Rebedding/re-caulking all this hardware is on our to-do list. I guess it jumps to the top of the list. There are also old "repairs" from previous deck hardware. Repairs that needed to be dug out and filled with epoxy. All these new filled in holes will require new painting of the nonskid areas on the deck.....add another item to the list!


Here is all the old hardware in place (mostly)




The deck hardware removed with butyl tape to cover the holes in case it rains.


Now, we can't just put back our crummy old stand up blocks, might as well get all new! Our old ones just had turning wheels, the new ones have nice bearings and should make our line handling much smoother!




See the nice shiney new one next to the crummy old?


Rember the lights? The LED lights were too small and dim for the job. Yes...might as well buy new, brighter LED's. Thats OK, it's only money....BOAT = Break Out Another Thousand. Stay tuned.