What was billed as a massive storm didn't quite turn out that way here in Hartford. Friday afternoon, the city used its emergency warning system to call every home and business to say that doom would become us if any cars were left parked on the street from Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon. The Mayor himself had recorded the message, which was delivered as one line in English and then that line repeated in Spanish. We hung up after the third sentence. We get it. We live in Southern New England where it snows in the winter. Of course lots of cars were left on the street and nothing happened except that the plows went around them. So much for effective government.
Anyhow, we started up the old snowblower on Saturday morning and took care of the six or eight inches of snow that had accumulated. Here's a picture. Don't get too excited looking at it.
By Sunday afternoon, we got around to some really important stuff: Drilling three 3/8-inch mounting holes in the anchor pulpit and sanding the finish off of the teak strips that serve as step pads on the boat.
Luckily, we had purchased a new 3/8-inch drill bit for this and we're glad we did. The pulpit is advertised as stainless and is 3/16-inch thick and it took a while to get through it.
Last week, we measured the pulpit so now we'll use the holes in the anchor roller to mark where to drill the pulpit itself using the same 3/8-inch drill bit, which about all it's good for now.
We're going to treat the new (and old) holes in the pulpit with epoxy, just in case it is balsa-cored, which it probably is. That will keep the water intrusion at bay. Then we'll mount the new anchor roller bedded in 3M 4200. It will never come off again in our lifetimes.
Then we went at those little teak strips. All of the old finish had to come off because we are going tt treat each strip with CPES before we begin to apply the Sikken Cetol. As we mentioned previously, there isn't much left of these little strips, having been stepped on for 33 years. We tried hand sanding them with 80 grit but that wasn't going to do it. We used our belt sander clamped upside down in a vice and very carefully sanded each strip. That actually worked pretty well.
There's still some old crud in the grain of a couple of strips but we can't really afford to take off any more material at this point. They are getting very thin.
We mixed up a couple of ounces of CPES and brushed it on. We love the smell of CPES and varnish. Guess it reminds us of past boat projects.
The strips soaked up the CPES immediately.
You can see in the upper right hand corner where we marked each strip. The Silverton "craftsmen" just slapped them down when the boat was made so each strip now has its own unique mounting holes.
We also got some work done on our boarding steps. We refinished this one several years ago but it was beginning to show some wear.
We took it apart and then spent some time polishing the aluminum with YachtBrite Buff Magic. One of the rubber tips had split, so we replaced them both with new ones from Home Depot. Five bucks for four. Guaranteed to last two summers.
As you can see from the picture, the aluminum polishes nicely.
As good as it looks, this won't last. Aluminum just isn't compatible with a salt water environment. Maybe we can spray it with some coating, but I think we'll be taking these off again in a few years and polishing them again.
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