September 12th
I have to thank Melissa, for the best packed lunch I think I’ve ever had. Complete with pre-sliced apples and a sandwich cut down the middle. Thankyou!
As for the boatwork, I got the electrical panel mostly wrapped up today. I should be running wire soon! I had initially planned to get the dc breaker faceplate CNC cut by the machinist at the shop I used to work at, but he was unavailable this week, so I had a go at hand cutting it. It went alright until I cracked the acrylic panel on the top left. High speed, low feed seems to be the way to go with this stuff. I’ll see if he’d be willing to CNC cut me a replacement but this one will play for now.
The mainsheet track is now permanently bolted down. You can see in the photo’s that the tiller can now go into a vertical position opening up the cockpit for activities.
To finish the day I test fit the new boat. She’s a little long for the foredeck, but it would work. I may end up cutting two feet off the bow and turning it into a pram to fit better and take some weight out of it.
Getting it up on the spinnaker pole wasn’t too panful, although I need to devise a way of flipping the dinghy upright/upside down for launch and retrieval.
I’ll probably end up changing the jib halyard winch to one of the self-tailors I picked up. Unfortunately the bolt pattern is different, but luckily the mast is a tree trunk, so some extra, tactical holes shouldn’t hurt its strength too much. The bottom of a mast is where most of the compression loads are, so this is not something that should just be done without some forethought.
