24 Hours Later.

Change of format, straight to boat talk. Dove right into the 36' Calvin project today removing all the hatches and deck plates within a mater of hours. Once the hatches were removed the amount of water saturation had ruined the plywood around the hatches in the deck. Since the entire deck is being removed the rotten plywood won't be an issue.

After the hatches had been removed Clay started around the outside of the deck with an edge cutter to cut through the top layer of glass. After the outside edge had been cut he started cutting 3 ft squares and peeling up the old fiberglass. Once he was half done with the fiberglass removal, Jeff started to remove the plywood. The plywood removal presented a small challenge of getting the resin out of the screws. Because the screws that were used on this deck were Phillips head (x - head) instead of slotted the resin has a tendency to stay with the screw instead of being pulled up with the fiberglass. The solution was to take an old Phillips head screwdriver and a hammer and pulverize the resin (and ruining the screwdriver).

The entire deck should be removed by the end of the day tomorrow. We also had to remove a fuel tank under the stern of the boat (not pictured) and pump out all the fuel in the stainless steel fuel tanks before we could remove them. Using a 12 volt fuel pump we pumped all the diesel into 55 gal drums, there was about 80 gal of fuel in the tanks. During the fuel pumping process I tried to save time by not clamping the hoses to the pump and ended up getting covered with fuel. Face, eyes, hair, pants, sweatshirt, etc..... covered. After getting 2 clamps we completed the removal of all the old fuel. I can still taste the fuel. Lesson learned but the punishment didn't fit the crime in that case. The kid that was helping me didn't get any fuel on him and proceeded to laugh at my misery.

In other shop news the boat that received the new motor (pictured) is done and has been moved outside. Another old boat (not pictured) has been moved into the shop and I will be getting the repair list in the next couple of days. The steering issues that I talked about a couple of days ago are still unresolved. The 38' South Shore that we phillycladed on Sunday is going to get some minor fiberglass repair tomorrow and it was 45 degrees today. After 3 weeks of arctic air I felt like mentioning the warm weather was necessary. Our welder modified a stainless steel rudder for a local lobsterman. The boss left for Daytona yesterday, so I guess I'm in charge for the next week.

So how do you like the new format? Two pictures, shorter posts, no obsessing about the blog at the beginning of the post. This is by far my weakest effort to date, I'll be better tomorrow.

I should sub-contract out the rest of these posts to a professional writer. They would be much better and infinitely more interesting. 7 posts in 7.75 days.