… But first, let’s fix that bilge pump, lest we lose another night’s sleep! Notice my (James’) new hair cut! Doesn’t it look great with my hands in the bilge? Lying awake in the middle of the night back at the community, I fantasized about how dreadful this job was going to be. Covering my entire body with bilge muck, screaming and cussing, wishing that I could just…smoke a cigarette…take a shotgun and blow seven holes into the hull of that boat and just watch it sink… With the Rule SuperSwitch, there’s a hole for a fastener at the forward end. There’s also a notch under the float for a second fastener, in a place that is designed by a truly insane human being. You cannot get to it with any tool. You have to set the fastener up first…remember, this is in the oily, stinky, freezing bilge…put it at the perfect depth, slide the notch around the fastener, and then tighten the whole thing down with the forward fastener. I’ve done this job before and it never takes less than 3 hours. But this time, the old switch literally came apart in my hands. It just disintegrated. I set the screw at the perfect depth and slid the switch onto it the very first time. I clipped all the wires down, hooked everything up, did all the shrink wrap, and the whole job took about an hour. The most important thing about this picture: when using a very powerful hand tool, you should always look at your job. But damn, I look good. Did I mention I got a haircut? There it is. That’s all the bilge pump you’ll ever see. In the upper left corner of the photo above? That’s the bilge pump switch – with both auto[…]
Read moreMonth: January 2013
Primary Mock-Up
This week we took all of the measurements we’ve been doing over the past month and applied them to our sheets Azek. Each sheet started out 4 feet by 8 feet and our working space is almost exactly 6 feet long by a little under four feet wide so we had plenty of material to work with and then some for our drawers and cabinets that we will build into the installed unit. The new sink is much bigger than the old one (74cm wide) and has a somewhat domestic appeal, it has two very large, very deep, pans. Instead of cutting one big hole for the sink we laid the sink out on the cut-out Azek, up-side-down, and drew out the hole cuts on the Azek. Then we measured them out for exactness. We punched a small hole, just big enough for the saw blade, in the Azek and cut the holes precisely the right size to fit the sink in, you’ll see why in a second. After that we had to practically shave out little pieces with the jig-saw here and there to get the sink to fit but it did and we put it into place. Then we mocked the whole thing up just like it will be on the boat. As you can see, we used the sink cut-out pieces as lid-cutting boards for the sink pans. The right side of the image will be the new settee while the left cut-out will be the new place for the stove. We rented a car and took all the pieces that are too big to fit in the bike trailer to the boat to fit them into place. Once we got to the boat we discovered the bilge pump had stopped working so we had to dedicate[…]
Read morePutting the Cart in its Proper Position
Another wild week of working at an independent living senior retirement community. For therapy, we go downstairs to the woodshop and prepare pieces of Azek for their new homes. Last week, after we did all of the construction we wanted to do, we took a careful set of measurements. We measured from the front of the cabinet to the hull every 5 cm. Back at the community, we transferred those distances to a piece of Azek, then connected the dots to make a rough image of the hull. With that done, the cuts were pretty straightforward. Well, completely strange and curved, but not a problem. Azek, a petroleum complex Poly Vinyl Chloride material that can be molded into almost any shape known to man, is perfect for modern boat construction because it sands easily, epoxy and fiberglass adhere to it, it cuts like butter with a jig saw and, best of all, it never rots. See those serious looks on our faces? If you look serious enough, it’s okay not to wear eye protection. Wards off the little pieces that fly around at high speeds. Anyway. We also received a lovely new tool in the mail. It’s a cart that attaches to the spindle for the back wheel of a bike. So when the time came to ride our bikes to the boat, we loaded those cut pieces of Azek and our backpacks into the cart, hooked it up to James’ bike, and toddled off. I (Dena) was so thrilled with this whole procedure that I cackled the whole way there. Glowing, grinning, gloating. We totally fucked over the oil industry today. That’s a good day in my book. This was only mildly complicated by the couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s been pretty warm, so the snow[…]
Read moreLow Tide Revelations
The ice began its rapid melting process last Monday night and we were in the basement wood shop putting a new coat of paint on the Rutland 913 wind generator. We have discovered that even though our employment is not necessarily physically hard work, it is taxing none-the-less and riding to the boat on Monday night after work is just a little much. So we continued working on the projects that we have going here at the community. I found a new (to me) bike on Craigslist for a couple of hundred bucks, a steal really, borrowed a car and went out to the middle of bum-fuck Rhode Island last Thursday to pick it up. I was stoked to put the new ride to the test on the muddy ice-melt through the Bluff Point State Park and Tuesday morning we made that happen. It was a blast! Dena rode my old bike, which we originally bought for her anyway, and had no problems riding through the goo. My new bike, a 2010 Trek Wahoo with a single speed gear set-up, is pretty much built for me and it rides like a dream. It is a bit harder to deal with being as though I can’t rely on the 21 speed gear package my old bike pampered me with but I got used to it quickly and had a great time muddying it up on my first time out. By the time we got to the boat we were both covered in muck and laughing our asses off. We got right to work… As soon as I stepped on the boat I noticed that the batteries were completely dead! There wasn’t even enough power in the house bank to run the power meter. By the time Dena had stepped aboard I[…]
Read moreThe cold rebuild
As it’s prone to do here in the New England, Atlantic North East we got dumped on with 4 inches of snow in 5 hours, followed by 3 days of hard-freeze creating the ultimate conditions for bike riding! As much as we love riding our bikes in the rain and dodging cars, riding 5 miles through the state park on the (not-quite) virgin frozen hard-pack was a blast for sure. I’m not just bragging here, we really do love to do this kind of thing! On the ride to the boat it had warmed up quite a bit so the snow in the back country was pretty hard on Dena’s balance being as though she’s got these skinny little street tires on the borrowed bike she’s been riding lately. Neither one of us fell, it was just slow going is all. Oh yeah… The night before we rode out to the boat we had to barrow a car to come out and get the rest of the big pieces to the Aries windvane steering system that we took off the boat last week. While Dena took the stuff back to the community and took care of a bunch of other “car” duties, I stayed behind on the boat and hooked up the new 12 volt refrigerator for testing. I temporarily set it up in our “New Hole”, the place where the Pilots Birth will be, hooked up the power that had been for the old fridge and the new refrigerator kicked right on. It’s quite, has a functional thermostat and only uses 2.5 amps while the pump is on, in other words, it works perfectly. I left it on for the 2 and a half hours that Dena was gone and it cycled through enough times to keep it’s self[…]
Read moreGoodnight Caroline…
Caroline Lichtenwager lived across the hall from us once. She was a beautiful 94 year old woman with a Bourbon rasp and shining blue eyes. She worked out every single day by walking up and down our hallway pushing her walker and hauling her oxygen tank like it was weight of her entire life. I’d say say hi and she’d say, “I’ve got to work out every day Dave, I hate it but I’ve got to do it.” Caroline Lichtenwager loved her orchid, it looked like this… …She told me her orchid was the richest thing she’d ever known. I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant by that but I told her, In that case I have to take a picture of it! She let me. Although she never learned my name even though I wore a stupid name-tag every time I saw her Caroline Lichtenwager was my neighbor and my friend. I only knew her for four months but she made my life better. On December 31st 2012 Caroline Lichtenwager died in her sleep.
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