S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

I love to update the blog with checkboxes as we go. Feels good to celebrate the wins and document our progress. As you know we’re working toward stepping our masts on Thursday 24 June.

I got all the pins from Andersen Machine Shop in Port Townsend and they were beautiful. Had a slight mishap with them last week because I put in an incorrect dimension (too long) for some of the pins, but with PT all mail is basically overnight so we were able to send them back have them cut down and get them back in 2 days! I highly recommend Andersen Machine Shop. Olaf is a very nice guy and was very helpful. He made our pins on his CNC machine, they look awesome.  With pins in hand I was able to attach all of the rigging to the masts! I did all that in the pouring “Junary” rain we’re experiencing in Seattle this summer so no pics yet.

On the boat Dawn has been working on the ash battens to line the aft berth, v-berth and open lockers.

First she’s lining all our lockers with Reflectix Insulation  which looks like aluminum foil bubble wrap. We’re laying it in loose along the hull NOT gluing it down. We don’t ever want to have to scrape the hull for a month again. The insulation will keep a tad warmer here in Seattle and a tad cooler in the Tropics. It’s pretty cheap, you can get it at Home Depot and its easy to work with.

Here’s what the battens look like when they are installed. Dawn as always does gorgeous work when I stay out of the way. ;-)

The only thing left to do before we step the masts on Thursday are to install the mast steps and make some leather grommets for the wiring exits on the main mast. After that I’ll remount the booms and winches along with a couple other things. Right after we tune the rig we should be able to sail again!

Dawn has finished re-installing the chainplates. She used leftover butyl from the portlight installation to seal the chainplates as they go through the deck and then put the cover plates on with 4200 and screws. The picture is is before she’s pushed all the butyl in.

She’s also been working to fair up the mast partner (where the mast go through the deck into the salon before attaching to the keel) by laying on epoxy and sanding it down. This seals the core of the deck and provides a smooth surface for when we then seal the mast\deck opening with Spartite. Dawn has been kicking much butt!!

I’ve been finishing up the electrical installations on the masts, attaching all of the other bits that go up there and attaching the rigging to the masts. Along with that I’ve also been doing some Amsteel splicing for fixed sections of the running rigging. This is a pretty simple bury splice that is secured by thru-stitching and then whipping it. Samson has great splicing instructions on their website, this was a Class II 12 Strand Eye Splice (PDF). I didn’t use a fiddle as they show, I used Brion Toss’ Splicing Wands which are absolutely awesome! You can buy them online or probably at your local chandlery.

At this point I’m a couple of properly sized pins and some thru bolts away from finishing up at the yard. Finding the right length of clevis pins is proving to be more of a pain than I had imagined. I don’t know why manufacturer’s don’t make each pin diameter in all the necessary lengths. Now I know my old pins were so horribly long.

I will will also be having <The Yard> make me a new bolt that thru-bolts the main lower shroud tangs. It’s a custom lathed part. This pic is of the original one after it was cut off. Here is one of each side when it was installed.

All of this is goodness and will let us put the rig back up. I am going to order the new halyards this week as well. Once the rig is up we’ll finish up the booms and mount the winches. The main goal though is to get all of the parts and tools out of 3 places and get them all on to the boat so I can work in one place and not run around so much. Progress happens, and when it does we love it !!

This week was full of unexpected issues and problems and very little movement forward on projects.

It started out when we noticed the some leaking with our newly installed portlights, which is fine really, a bit of tweaking was expected. However the leak got into the new wood (which was not marine grade) and caused it to swell. So we’re going to have pull down the new cabin top wood and re-seat the portlights to do that. We are not looking forward to that as the new wood was put up with epoxy, much grinding or demolition is going to be involved in that. New marine grade plywood has been ordered, if you learn one thing from me do not skimp on materials. I don’t normally skimp we did this one time and it bit us hard. Take the time to do it right and use the right materials.

This next one really pisses me off. When I had the yard install the conduit in the mast I also specified that they pull messenger lines to the masthead, spreaders and foredeck\steaming light. Well they did that but they didn’t make the holes big enough for the wire. I didn’t specify a size and they didn’t ask so this is really a communication problem (one of many with the yard) but I’m not sure why they would drill any holes without explicitly knowing what size. So, I had to drill new holes in the conduit and snake new messenger lines. Once that was done I find out that I still can’t get the wire to pull through because at the angle I’m pulling (90 degrees right out the hole) all I can do is flex the tubing once the wire has exited. I can’t get any more vertical pull. That lead to an almost complete meltdown on my part. I was thinking I’d had to eat the cost the boat cable and pull primary wires instead. Now I’m thinking maybe I can pull back several feet of the insulation and still pull the wire. We’ll see. I’m sure it’s going to be another week of dinking around with that whereas I expected to be done pulling wires this weekend.

Dawn did make progress on some painting though. When we originally pulled down the hull lining and painted we left all the teak in place that covered the chainplates. We have since removed that teak and pulled the chainplates to clean them up and we’ve decided we’re going to not re-install that teak instead leaving the chainplates uncovered so we can see them and any leaking or corrosion issues. So Dawn has been painting that exposed fiberglass white to match the areas we had previously painted white. This is good because now I can start rebedding the chainplates. I’ll have an entire post on that process.

I didn’t really want to write this post, but I figured it was important so you can all learn from our mistakes and see that doing a refit like this is a lot of work and despite planning things will go awry. So with that unpleasantness behind us we are ready to kick much but in the next couple of weeks with our complete focus on everything needed to re-step the masts.

When we bought our Pearson 424, we knew right off the bat we had to replace the portlights and the teak eyebrow trim along the outsides of the cabin top. The existing portlights were old and leaked causing the interior teak veneer to delaminate, no structural issues. The plastic windows were also hazed over and they just looked poor. At the 2009 Seattle Boat Show we made the first decision towards the beginning of this big project in that we purchased our new portholes from New Found Metals, located in Port Townsend, WA. Its always nice to be able to support local businesses.

The new portlights are either slightly larger (in case of the 5”x12”) or much larger than the existing portlights so there is some work to enlarge the holes once the existing portlights are removed. Doing all of this prep work is actually really easy using the templates provided by New Found Metals. You clamp the template in place, trace your lines and cut out the new hole. You also use the template to drill all the holes for thru bolting the portlight to the outer trim.

One time consuming piece is handling the bolts. You have to custom cut the bolts that attach the portlight to it’s outer trim. Every hull is a different thickness so they can’t really stock every possible length. I used my handy vise, cut them with the Fein Multimaster, cleaned them up with the dremel and a sanding wheel and then used two bolts to ensure the threads were clean. Here’s a video of that process.

As we’re replacing the portlights, we’re also putting up new wood along the interior teak along the insides of the cabin top. We will match the new headliner to this when we replace that as well. Painting it all white will brighten the boat considerably and visually make the cabin feel a bit taller. We’re using 1/4” plywood, primed on the finished side at the workshop prior to installation. We epoxy the new wood to over the top of the existing wood. That is a pretty involved process of making a paper template, cutting out the new pieces, dry fitting them (which involves a lot of tweaking) then making the cut outs for the portlights and then finally epoxying the new wood in place.

Here are a bunch of photos which roughly chronicle the process. Click thru for larger pics or to see more. They look awesome, the glass is so clean and clear I keep thinking they’re open!

Ticked a few things off the to do list the past few days.

New Years Eve day, Dawn worked on the masts and booms filling all the holes we don't need anymore with Belzona 1111. Thanks to at for helping us get started. Dawn is really good at these kinds of projects that require being neat and detailed oriented. I'm better at breaking things an making a mess.

The bilge hoses have all been replaced. This took a little longer than planned because I used stiffer hose which added some unforeseen complexity. It also became delayed due to an apparent shortage of 316 SS hose clamps in the size I needed. Fisheries Supply in Seattle is horrible at managing their stock, but their prices are better than West Marine. Included in this a Perko bronze strainer for the manual bilg pump and an inline check-valv on the stern end of the seconday\large bilge pump. I am considering walling off the aft-most section of the bilge to minimize the area which stays wet. We would place the primary pump in that section but if we had more water than that then it flow over the wall and we would kick on the secondary pump. We also need to put a float switch on the primary bilge pump, currently it is only enabled by the breaker switch.

The Walter Machine RV-20 V-Drive has a raw water cooling chamber on the top of it which is prone to corrosion. Eventually it can corrode through allowing sea water to mix with the oil in the bottom half of the v-drive where all the gears are. This would be bad. Several owners have cleaned up the corrosion and used Marine-Tex to protect the area before hooking everything back up. Some owners (including my surveyor who also owns a Pearson 424) have removed the raw water cooling altogether. The corrosion in my unit is so bad that it damaged one of the bolt holes used to attach the top plate to the v-drive so I am going the route of leaving the unit dry. So now instead the raw cooling water going from the strainer to the v-drive and then to the egine it now goes directly from the strainer to the engine. I will install a temperature gauge on the v-drive to monitor it for overheating and I left the hoses in place so I could hook it up back if it ever did overheat. Eventually we will probably replace the v-drive, but that is not something we wanted to do right now.

I have not finished this yet, but the anchor washdown pump was not protected by a strainer. I purchased all the hoses, clamps and the Sherwood strainer. This will get installed completed tomorrow. I would have finished it today, but I forgot to buy the mounting bracket.

I also capped off the vent thru-hull that used to be part of the holding bag system. I will also being putting a plug on the inside portion of the deck fiting for pumping out. I thought about removing and glassing these closed, but I don't this it's neccesary, capping them of is adequate redundance. I also put a plug in the thru-hull I eventually plan to use for the water maker. It has a ball valve, but I like the added security of the plug as well. This is something we'll do just before we plan to leave.

All in all it was nice to tick a few thing off the list, but we still have a ways to go!