Esper Refit 6 – removing a dorade vent; white vine veneer

The veneer has arrived! Not only that, Hong Kong Phooey has already begun putting it up. Meanwhile, somewhere close by, I’m cursing my way through a rather frustrating issue involving tiny bearings and a large hammer. Still, we took a day off on Monday for a little birthday cruise.

Week Six Summary Video

A light-hearted look at our superstar carpenter team.

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A Dash of White Vine

Oh boy, our wallpaper has arrived. Twenty sheets of it, all ready to be pasted onto our walls.

Liz’s Office is pretty much complete so Ton has been putting up the veneer. This was probably the most difficult for the carpenters since he had to deal with the new curved wall dividing the old heads and the forepeak.

El Dorade Has Gone

The yard has run out of honeycomb so Moo has been cracking on with his multitude of other jobs. Two sea-cocks have been ground out, filled and fared (one of these has been permanently closed whilst the other is being relocated). He had great fun cutting away our dorade vent, which we have decided to fill in.

The question many of you boat owner’s may be asking is, why get rid of it?

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• It has been closed for years
• In the tropics the hatches are almost always open
• It’s not a living area, it’s used mainly for storage
• It frees up quite a bit of space on the deck

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We’d be interested to know what other yachties think of this decision.

Is The Bearing Straight?

As you know we had some serious issues with our forestay and sail furling mech. It was time to take the thing apart and investigate the cause, find a solution and take a look at those bearings too.

The upshot of it all was that all replaceable bearings were fine. Indeed none of them needed replacing, except the ones on the in-fast furling mech. The problem bearings were the larger one in the drum, and Hood no longer makes them! Instead we’ve had to send the swivel off to Phuket in the hope that someone up there can find a replacement race, which was pitted and marked from years of wear.

One of the problems we had was removing the foil (the grooved piece of aluminium the sail slides up into). It is made up of nine pieces and each one is connected via an inner sleeve and a brass pin. We developed an ingenius way of removing the sleeve using a long piece of wood and hammering it up each foil, catching the sleeve and pulling it out. There’s a clip in the video, above, of us doing this. Once we’d cracked the first foil, the rest followed quite easily.

Plugging The Holes

Meanwhile, up on deck, Lek made plugs for the holes in the deck we’re looking to keep.

Sanding the Ash

We’ve set Mey to sanding the large areas of ash down below. The current, varnished ash is rather yellow so we’ve got her to sand back the varnish to bare wood. The idea will be to spray this white, and then sand the wood once more. This will remove most of the paint but leave bits of it in the grain. It’s a trick to help lighten the wood’s appearance and one we’ll be using for the teak floor.

What’s Next?

Hopefully work will begin on the deck. We’re putting a layer of epoxy down to fill holes and cracks and as a way to start smoothing the deck. The chart table is pretty much done, all it needs is the veneer finish, and the same can be said of Liz’s Study. There’s still a lot of veneering to do so we expect the carpenters to crack on with this. Meanwhile the head painter has said he wants to start putting a base coat on the top sides, so we could see Esper having the first of many coats applied over the next few days.[wb_fb_f name=”liz cleere” id=””]

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