Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Deck Disassembly Continued

Greetings! The past couple of weeks I have spent a good amount of time working on Windsong's decks, removing windows, and continuing the disassembly of the interior. I have been hoping to reach some finishing points on each of the areas I've been working on before blogging, but something always halts me and leaves each sub-project incomplete for a while. So for the sake of having something to post, I'll just show what I've done so far.

Most of the hardware on deck has been removed, with the exception of the stanchions and all hardware on the caprail. I haven't decided the path I will take on the caprail: remove the teak caprail to rebed, or just fillet some epoxy or sealant on the seams. I would remove the whole caprail but the bungs hiding the screws are not coming off easily and I find myself damaging the surrounding the wood with each try. I've learned all the different techniques for bung removal by disassembling all of the woodwork on the interior, but these exterior bungs are trouble. I could just leave the caprail on, clean and sand it, then seal the edges; but I know that won't be as good as removing and rebedding it fully. I just don't want a chipped up caprail in the end. Another option is to remove the bungs and just re-drill bigger holes to remove the damaged areas in the existing holes.

Aside from the hardware, there is a bit of teak trim on the decks of Windsong that needed to come off for re-bedding and deck painting. The trim came of easy enough, and once off I filled the screw holes with thickened epoxy to seal. Since the trim is on a vertical surface, I opted to use West System's Six10 Adhesive to fill them in, since it is already thickened and in a tube for easy use.

We (Jenny and I) also spent the time to remove all of the old windows. The windows (ports, deadlights, whatever you want to call them) were completely shot and I plan on replacing them all with quality opening ports. The large windows I have yet to decide on what to do with; I will either glass in the entire area and cut out smaller ports to make the boat more safe and seaworthy, or just replace them with quality frames and glass. Right now I am leaning towards glassing them in as shown here.

I have also finally removed the entire headliner inside the boat and have cleaned up the exposed glass a bit (tons of rusty staples used for the headliner). The interior is almost to the point where I can begin prep for painting, but I will wait for that so I can finish the priority projects.

Here are some pictures of the work done in the past few weeks:

The deck trim:







Removal:


Holes taped, drilled a little bigger, countersinked:


Filled with goop


Removing Windows!

Had to start by chizzeling away the frames. They were stuck on there with decades of goop and sealant.



Once the frame is chipped away, its time to bash the window out as demonstrated here (video):

From Disassembling Windsong

Then chip away the remaining sealant




The headliner was stapled into the core of the windows. I had to remove each rusty staple with some pliers.





I then sealed up the windows with some plastic. Here are the decks after window removal




The weather has been fantastic at the boat yard in the evenings. Recently, was able to work on the boat and not have to take a shower afterwards for the first time all year.


As always, you can see all the pictures of my progress here:

Disassembling Windsong




4 comments:

Robert Salnick said...

We elected to keep the big windows on Eolian, they were part of the reason we liked the boat in the first place. But we replaced the crappy, weak factory-original windows with custom-made ones from Bomon. These things are stout!

Recommendation: avoid Lexan glazing - tho it is a little stronger, it does not tolerate exposure to the UV in sunlight very well at all.

bob

Windtraveler said...

Wow, great progress Erick- it might not always feel like it (trust me, we know!) but you are doing awesome work!

audeojude said...

Thats funny... we pulled the trim on Valkyr a few weeks ago and filled the holes with the west systems 6 also, it sure made it easy to just be able to inject it. We found it took one whole tube to fill it all up. We had a few holes that must have had gaps in or around the core where the hole was. They are all full of epoxy now though.

Erick said...

I experienced a similar phenomenon, Scott. I would inject the epoxy into the holes and it seemed like they would never fill up. I became worried that the epoxy would just continually find gaps to fill in the core and I could squirt a whole tube into one hole. Eventually I would just count to 10 when filling a hole and figure that it was full enough.