Week 26: Zoom – Bolt on

The deck paint is dry and we have been busy. There is lots of gear to put back on Gypsy. We’re taking a break from the day jobs to bolt on hardware.  First task:  find the bolt holes. Every hole had been covered with a little square of tape and then it got painted over. The holes should show up as bumps in the paint. Some just blended in. It takes a good memory or being able to find the holes from below.  A good kabab skewer poked up from below, and out they pop.  They then need to be cleaned up with an x-acto knife.  There were hundreds of them.  Each day, we’ve managed to find more.  Four days in, we think we got most of them, although there are at least four of them we haven’t found yet, mainly because they are cast in and we can’t poke them out from below.

We are very happy with the deck color. It looks like beige, but we prefer to think of it as a rich cream.  We did not want to end up with a white boat.  The non-skid paint we will apply is a bit lighter in a similar color. The non skid will end up covering about half of the deck and where the white parts are still showing.

Tuesday we tackled hand rails. We had to cut new pipe for the long rails on the cabin top. The threaded backing plates worked very well for the handrails.

We also installed the staysail track, shorepower AC inlet, staysail chainplate, anchor line cleat, anchor chain stopper and the anchor locker vent deck plate.

Wednesday we put the starboard toerail on. This required lots of caulk, 80-plus long machine screws and a lot of bolt tightening in awkward places.  We also got the stern dinghy cleats and the upper brackets for the Monitor wind vane installed.

Today we put the port toerail on. 82 more bolts. It took just as long as the starboard rail.

How did we do all of this?

The pictures show the basic steps except for bolt tightening and cleanup.  All the gushed out caulk gets cleaned up.  Everything that gets screwed into the boat gets lots of caulk and cleanup.