Soup is fated to be gel-coated on the 16th of January, move in to her slip, and have her hardware put back together!
January 10, 2010
December 2, 2009
Still alive
It’s been raining all day. I hope it’s not the season for that sort of thing around here because then all I have to do is sit around the computer and deal with… you folks!
This looks to be my first update in quite a while. While it is bad for documentation purposes, it is great for productivity. Of course, we missed our “November 1″ finish date for Soup. We have just finally gotten the decks in, the mast step in, and almost all the glass work done on the exterior. We are in various stages of getting the boat ready to gel-coat on the exterior. We have portions of the old glass sanded and ready, but other portions are still not ready. The new glass needs to be filled and faired still. That was the planned project for last weekend, but during the week we found that the only region that we didn’t re-core needed some repairs. We knocked that out. I swear, we are making progress!
In other news, we are all still alive and relatively well. The weather change is taking a toll, as usual. The early sunset is eating my productivity, but increasing the time that I spend sitting at the computer reading the news, making a third earnest attempt at learning Spanish, and maybe even updating this blog again.
It has been too long and I won’t even try to make this list of updates sound coherent:
1) I bought a new truck a month ago: a huge F250 diesel pickup. It’s, of course, not new but a 2003. I got a good deal on it and it has made my life about 300% easier since then.
2) We have been looking at both houses and boats, trying to decide where to live next. Lauren and I have promised to not rent again after this lease is up. We don’t know if we are going to stay in New Orleans after the lease is up, but we are looking at houses here anyway.
3)Lauren is now working at Emeril’s Delmonico and doing well. Most of her coworkers are either in college or have a degree, and she has a career position there. Depending how that goes, that will be one factor that sways our decision about staying in this city.
4) I have made a lot of progress in my job as well. I have no complaints, considering the sob, sob economy. I have gone from mildly ignorant and dubious about my mechanical skills to a well equipped marine professional–at least at a decent boatyard level–in well under a year. I am preparing to start my ABYC electrician certification, but need to get a few other ducks in a row before I have the spare money and time to do so. Then again, we’ll see what happens on all these other fronts over the next six months. The progress that I’ve made as a carpenter, which I am most certainly not at my job, is astounding. When we moved in to our house on Mandeville Street I attempted to make Lauren an art table. It was wobbly (an understatement), hideous, and generally made of failure. I am currently working on my third table, and you can tell the difference. I am no skilled trim carpenter but I’m doing better all the time! The high quality tools that I have purchased over the duration as well as the joy of watching a handful of excellent carpenters around my job site have made all the difference.
5) I am almost 2 months without a cigarette and I’m 1,000% more jittery, twitchy, and gnashing of the teeth. My bank account, lungs, and heart are better off though.
6) Life is not all bad / mostly excellent.
Hopefully this post marks me making time for writing again, but don’t get optimistic.
July 19, 2009
Top Deck and Interior
We got the foam core in the top deck yesterday. Unfortunately, since Miles and I were the only two out there we didn’t get any pictures. I’ll snap a few of the final product and get them up in a few days. We have some sanding, filling, and then two more layers of glass to lay before the top deck is in place.
We screwed up pretty badly in the top deck cut out, though. As we were preparing for the installation of the foam, we screwed three 2×6s to the ceiling, lengthwise. One in the center of the companionway and another one on each side. This was to preserve the shape. They helped in one dimension, but dragged the whole roof down more in another. I could no longer stand inside the boat–the ceiling had been pulled down 3 or 4 inches. We took a boat stand and propped it up from the inside. This should have been done BEFORE we pulled the top skin and balsa core out. Hopefully, in the end, it will make little difference, but there are a few small cracks to the lower skin that would not have been there had we done it right the first time. Also, the added rigidity of the beams and boat stand would have made the filled edges more seamless. Again, it probably won’t make a lot of difference in the end, but doing it right the first time would have saved five or six hours of labor and some heartache.
While this was going on I had a chance to talk to William, the carpenter about the yard, and he gave me a bunch of information about how to do our interior. I was formerly under the impression that it is 100% necessary to use marine grade ply on everything on the interior that we want to be plywood. Incorrect. He says that we can easily use cabinet grade plywood at about $30 a sheet from Lowe’s. This will then get painted. Also, he says that very little fiberglass will be necessary to complete the interior. We will use a minimal amount of epoxy (not polyester) for tabbing the initial frames in to the hull. The edges of the plywood then need to be trimmed. The teak that my parents bring down will be used for that.
We had the foam in by two or three o’clock and Miles took off. He was exhausted from his first week of work. Me waking him up bright and early did not help. I stuck around and went after the interior. It was cool in the boat with a fan blowing in the forward hatch and a tarp over the top deck. With my new Makita set all charged up I went to sawing and banging at the remains of the old interior. The v-berth was glassed in quite heavily. The tabbed edges have a quarter inch of glass on the top and bottom. Instead of painstakingly prying and grinding them out I am just going to leave them there, paint them, and use them for the frame of the new berth. This should make the new installation go a lot faster. Any bad wood will be easy to take out, but the good stuff will be left.
The small shelves came out easily when I used a chisel to cut the tabbing and then banged them a few times with a hammer. The main cabin is almost ready for sanding. We’ll lay a coat of primer then a coat of white paint over the whole interior before beginning the rebuild. I’ll post our drawn up plans when the stripping is finished. Hopefully that will happen next week.
Every few days I oscillate between optimism and pessimism at our November 1 finish deadline, but now it is looking pretty good. We have a lot of work left, but it is moving along at a steady pace!
July 12, 2009
Soup deck recore and electrical rough plan
We have been working hard on Soup over the last month. This is the first weekend that we have not actually done any work. Now, finally, late on Sunday night I feel that I am capable of sitting down to write about it.
1) We got the foredeck re-cored with foam that Francisco sold us. It looks like hell because we haven’t done the fairing and filling yet, but it is as solid as can be.
2) We have cut out the cabin top, filled the edges, sanded it, cut the foam and glass, and are ready to finish the job when we have a cool evening to proceed. This job is going to be harder than the foredeck, as the cabin top is curved. First, we have to buttress the sagging middle. We may have to lay the foam in strips. Otherwise, we may have to make a form for it and sculpt it with hot water. That sounds like a lot of fun. We’ve come across a number of roadblocks along the way with this piece. Namely, both of my drills are deceased currently. I am putting in the order in the morning for the Makita 702 contractor kit. Hopefully that will solve our tool crisis.
3) We have done the spreadsheet for Soup and are at about $2,000 including the initial purchase cost. This is somewhat discouraging as we are nowhere near ready to cruise.
4) I just came up with a basic list of the electrical system that we will install on Soup. We have a good deal on a gasoline genset that we will mount on the poopdeck ($600) and a cruiseair system ($??). Some of these things will come later.
A/C circuits on Soup powered by Shore Power and GENSET:
1) Air condition
2) Battery charger (GFI) (~$150)
3) Kitchen 2gang (GFI)
a. Microwave (~$80)
b. Toaster Oven (~$50)
c. Hotplate (~$50)
4) Fridge? (later)
5) Computer (GFI)?
6) Outlets
D/C circuits on Soup powered by 2 group 27 batteries (1 for genset starting, 1 for house) buy additional for $80.
1) Nav lights (maybe retrofit with LEDs?)
2) Cabin lights (retrofit with LEDs ~$40
3) Cockpit lights?
4) Bilge pump
5) Depth ($100)
6) Charger for phone, radio? Etc
7) FitPC? ($200)
Inverter?
The electronics alone will be another ~$1500 including genset.
We are still hoping to have her ready to cruise by November 1.
May 15, 2009
Happy Birthday Grandpa!
My Grandpa, Eugene McGraw, is turning one hundred years old on Sunday. Lauren and I can’t be there, so here are these pictures. My parents took a similar picture for Eugene’s father, Oliver, when he turned 100.
Happy birthday, Grandpa!
Note: I’m sorry that I lost my dress shoes.
May 7, 2009
Gutting Soup
Since we can’t get her in the yard for now we’ve been working on cleaning out the interior. Hopefully, we will get her across the Lake a week from now and in to the yard sooner than later to start on the deck and whatever hull projects there will be (shudder).
We got to Soup around noon today and started making serious efforts on a lot of things. First, we got all the (5) sails out and in the car. Then I showed Lauren the mount bolts for the old A-4 and she got to work.
Soup's Atomic 4 as it's getting ready to come out
I did a bunch of vacuuming so that we could get at what we needed to without getting covered in old fiberglass and paint chips. Yum. Then Lauren got hold of the power drill. This picture is too rad to not post, even though it’s so blurry.
Lauren with the Ryobi in reverse
The port side had already been fairly demolished before we bought her. That is, some genius had made a few rough cuts with a circular saw and left a mess for us to clean up. On the starboard side, however, they left us a rotting galley and bench. Some of the lumber attached to them was nice varnished teak, but not much. Some of it was formerly nice laminated hardwood of some type. We unscrewed everything and started prying it out. After pulling the sink and galley area the rest came out in one big chunk! Under it was exactly the same rough cuts as on the port side! Someone had rebuilt this part of the boat already and done a shitty job. Or, they had done a decent job 50 some years ago–but that’s hard to imagine.
We kept going with the demolition and took out most of the closet and a good part of the forward V-berth. In that process we found a dinky ancient fiberglass water tank. I’m not very sure if I’m comfortable drinking out of this relic.
One thing that set in again today is exactly how small this boat is. Standing in the galley a good quarter of your lower body is under water. The depth finder through hull is sitting right there. In the Nit Noy all of this was way, way down under the floor, under the engine. The galley of this boat is in the engine room essentially. We’re going to have to be meticulous with the layout of this boat or it will just not be workable. And we have a lot of requirements.
We need to sleep at least 3. It would be nice if our two dogs could fit (cruising with the dogs presents many other unexplored problems).
Rafiki and Aiofe trying to stay in the shade
We need to eat. This requires room for food, water, a stove, and somewhere to put plates. We need to navigate. We need room to write, paint, and play music. We need lots of tools, because there’s no one else to fix our shit when it breaks. This list could tree off in to all kinds of sub-necessities. The biggest one is where to store everything.
The essence of sweat. Soup is like a pressure cooker. It's only May.
Oli trying to siphon the water out of the old water tank. Fail.
Soup's Guts
Another awesome realization: I may not have dropped the main halyard. It may very well have been the topping lift. However, someone else may have dropped the jib halyard and we may only have a spinnaker halyard. I’m so atrociously bad with knowing what all the rigging is that I should be made to walk the plank. It’ll be a lot easier to tell what we have when the mast is down and we can see what kind of mess is up top.
Yikes!
In other news, we’re going on vacation on Friday for our one year anniversary! We’re goin’ to a cabin for the weekend. No boat work. No house work, no work work. Just dogs, booze, and the Bogachitta River to tube in, and a thinking about how awesome a first year it has been.
May 6, 2009
Pictures of boat and house
First, pictures of Soup:
Lauren in Soup's cockpit
More cleaning of Soup
Oliver cleaning Soup
Soup as we found her
Now, some pictures of our house:
Lauren in her studio
My office under construction
The beginnings of my studio table
Cutting table legs
My (almost) finished studio)
Project Update
The good news is that I don’t have the swine flu. The bad news is that I have some sort of upper respiratory infection and eye infection (guh). Consequently, I have to put goo in my eyes six times a day. I can’t go back to work until Thursday because I’m contagious. Not that I don’t need the money, but I have lots of other things to do.
I have the papers sitting out on my desk for the boat re-registration. Somehow that costs $55 (3 year registration) + $8 (transfer).
We have the boat insured and new lines for her, as well. Friday, when we got all that taken care of, I started cutting and stringing the new rigging. I got the main sheet tied in, the jib halyard, and then started working on the main halyard. It had to go up to the top of the mast attached to the old halyard, through a block, and back down. I thought it would be best to tape the new to the old, end to end. In my excitement, I didn’t put much tape on. Of course, about nine tenths of the way up the new fell from the old. That killed all dreams of sailing the boat over to Orleans from Mandeville–I’ll never do that again.
It may have been a blessing in disguise, however. There’s no telling how sound the rigging is at the top of the mast or how well the chainplates, main mast step, or anything else would hold up under force. Better to tow her over and re fit everything before screwing around. Now that is insured.
Other news: I found a potential engine, a Universal Diesel M-40 for $500. The seller is out of town, so we’ll hear back on that deal in a week. Also, I found a deal on teak for 7/board ft for rough-hewn board. Compared to the lumber yard’s 25/board ft for milled, I’m pretty excited about buying some of that for trim and other small projects.
May 3, 2009
Deck Recore Project
Soup’s first major problem is that her decks are spongy. Floppy? Hmm… something is wrong. The construction of the decks on this boat is like a balsa sandwich. Instead of bread we are talking about fiberglass. When maintained poorly, built poorly, or both, water seeps in to the core and wreaks havoc. Deck recoring on the same make of boat is described here. They used marine plywood to do the job out of convenience. Nothing has appeared more or less convenient to me at this point, so I have found COM 29301 3/8” balsa core. How good is this? It is the same thickness as the origional stuff and it doesn’t seem to pricey…
Apartment, Job, Boat, Boat… Boat!
As always when things are happening too quickly I forget to blag. Here’s a rundown on our last few months.
The first few days of March we moved off the Nit Noy in to an apartment in the Marigny. The dogs had been getting in too much trouble in the new marina, eating dead things and then having stomach problems all over the boat. Rafiki had forceful pooping one day that sprayed half of our cabin. We started looking for apartments the next day.
Our new place came together quickly. We found it in the evening in late February after we had spent a day driving around to place that we found on craigslist. We missed most of our appointments because the car overheated and we had to hotwire the radiator fans to keep running. Driving around the Marigny that evening we found a few for rents signs. Lauren and I loved the neighborhood. Only a few blocks from Frenchmen and the quarter, near all the bars that we liked and potential employment for both of us it was pretty, safe, and (most importantly) not too expensive.
We moved in to the place with no locks on the doors, a messed up faucet in the bathroom, a leaky refridgerator, funky wiring, no furniture, no jobs, and barely enough money to pay the first month’s rent and a third of the deposit. Lauren got a job at the Wyndham doing room service and waitressing. Two days after moving in I got a job at Schubert’s Marine doing mechanic and electrical work. Almost every day for the first month we came home from work and worked on the place. The doors have locks, the bathroom sink runs, we have a new ‘fridge, and I have built Lauren a work table and myself a studio–more on that later.
Those of you who may be worried that we gave up on boating, don’t be let down. We have been sailing (almost) every Wednesday with NOYC and have been informed that our membership packet is waiting under the bar. More importantly we bought our first boat…
We bought our first boat!
Sorry. I thought that needed to be punctuated differently.
Pending Miles’ approval, her name is Soup. She is a 1959 Pearson Triton hull #86. She needs work. All of that will be documented here and other places as well.There are pictures of our cleanup effort on the camera, but it is not next to me right now. More on that later.
Miles gets here on the 15th. There’s more work to be done on the apartment. He needs to build a guard rail in his loft area. Then there’s an infinite amount of work to go in to the boat before she can set sail to the yonder.
More…