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Slow start to the day, weather a bit miserable, and maybe a hang over as well. Didn’t get as much done as we wanted, but some days are more productive than others. 🙂
First job was to finish the 14, the old Pole Sock has reached the end of its life, so Phillip Watson of Watson Sails in Kinsealy made us a new one. Conveniently he had the right colour cloth so it matched our black and white deck colours. With that fitted we spliced the kite tack line on and refitted the chute.
Means the 14 is now finished for the moment. Only piece of work left is to sort out the paint after last summer’s crash. But that can wait. With Ireland’s Covid restrictions starting to ease, hopefully we will be able to go sailing soon.
So back to the 600, today’s objective was to strip the rig and we hoped to get the sanding done as well.
As with the boat, there was been little maintenance done in a while. In the case of the mast the varnish is missing in large areas of the mast. Great from a sanding stand point, not so good from a materials view point.
Carbon is not great with UV, so there is an inherent worry that more damage has been done that can’t be seen. The rig has obviously been left with tension even when not in use.
Everything was jammed in, on or corroded in place. We hoped that we could just whizz the rivets out of the fittings, mask the mast off and start sanding. To start with we wanted to get the reefing piece out, we’d tried the day before and got no where using normal force. So a more direct approach was required, in the end we had to put a dowel through the boom hole, and hammer piece out. No damage but it took a while, a lot of cursing.
Then came the rivets… 3 broken drill bits (There are only a dozen or so rivets!), various holes in Tris’ hands and yet more cursing finally saw all of the fittings removed, except the spreaders. Don’t know what was used to bond it to the mast, sikaflex, mastic or what, but boy did it like its job.
3 hours of slowly but surely cutting the material away with small knives, and adding sustained pressure finally saw the spreaders removed. Patience payed off (Ok, talking Ali into doing it and not letting Tris loose paid off) and the fitting itself is still in a usable state.
So where does that leave us? Mast is now stripped as far as we are able, left the track, not worth trying to get it off. So will be sanding the mast this week.
Boat is totally stripped, with the wings off. Unfortunately the rear mounts wouldn’t release so came off with the wings, so those need to be released and reattached. Then we need to raid the goodies bag from all the gear we stripped off the 14 to replace blocks and call our Uncle Chumley of boatropes.co.uk to order up all new ropes.
The foils need the trailing edges and bottom corners damage fixed, but they are also blistered so will need to sanded, faired and resprayed.
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