Tuesday 12 August 2014

Metal boat bits

John Booth made me a nice tiller catch:
It attaches to the side of the rudder and keeps the tiller attached, since it's only held to the rudder with a bolt at its after end. It allows the tiller to be pivoted on the bolt and still useful for steering.

Here are some of the backing plates for the handrails:
This also shows the doubled cabin top beams. The second beam has a handrail bolt secured through it. There are six bolts securing each handrail.

Tabernacle Collar

Here's the original piece of metal securing the top parts of the tabernacle sides:
You can see that the starboard side has a split in it. Not good. So John made me a tabernacle collar out of some sturdy stainless:
It wraps around to the forward side of the tabernacle, holding the boards together against splitting:

New Feet for the A-frame

I wanted to be able to raise the mast with the stays still attached to the chainplates, so I opened a pre-existing hole below the stay attachment hole for the A-frame to seat in. Trouble was, I couldn't put the nut on the bolt because the hole was too close to the deck. So I bent some stainless ready rod and used it without a nut:
The hook keeps the rod in the hole on the chainplate. A bonus that comes with that is that now I can attach the A-frame pieces to the chainplates while standing on the deck, with no need to crouch down and fiddle with a nut.
The stays will be attached to the chainplates with Spectra line, not the stretchy nylon in the photo.

Tomorrow we lift Firefly up into the air to tickle her bottom.


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