Keelbolts

Collected the remaining keel bolts today, They cost a lot more than we
had hoped considering we had the material already. Anyway they should
do there jobs for a long time to come.
I finished scraping off the paint as well so I'll probably go down tomorrow
to mark and measure bad planks and start raking out the stopping and
caulking from some of them.
I also need to find a drill bit for the keel bolts, I should have ordered one
weeks ago by right.

Keel bolts, looking a couple of hundred bucks !

Deadlines

So with the pitter patter of another pair of tiny feet looming ever closer
I finally had to step away from Teal and knuckle down and finish of the
house. The good news is that I'm nearly free to get back to it and put
in another few weeks of work before the big arrival.
Hopefully when the time comes I will at least be able to escape to the shed
and do a few things like making the new rudder and restoring the sky light
as to not let it grind to a halt.
I took advantage of a break in the weather yesterday to move Providence
back to Oldcourt for the Winter where she remains for sale.
At least the two are now in the same place again and fishing as a hobby is
put to bed until next season so any spare time can be put to good use on
Teal.
Also I called about the keelbolts today and they are ready to be collected
so we should get them fitted quickly before the yard becomes even more
congested.
So much for R&R ay!

Week off

I'm not getting anything done for a week or two because other jobs need
attention. I was going to go and scrape the last of the paint off on Monday
but there isn't any rush with it.
The keel bolts should be ready very shortly so until they are in we can't build
our tent or set the boat up properly to go at planking.
Planking will be the next thing on the agenda though, I'm hoping to have her
ready for caulking in mid Winter and move on with the rest of the work early
in the new year.

More paint scraping

Ok so Ken headed away for the weekend and as he had said to me,
I couldn't wait for him to get back to strip the rest of the paint off so
I just did it myself. It seems that the planking really isn't too bad after alL.
We'll have to run some of the short planks further forward and a few of the
stealers need changing but there doesn't appear to be any full length to change.
Bit of a relief after all we've changed so far.
I also dropped in a 316 stainless driveshaft to be turned down into the 2 remaining
keelbolts so thats another job in progress.

Short larch planks, The larch blackens with the heat far quicker than the pitch pine which just boils with resin. We need to stagger these joints out a lot more.

Local boat building

I followed a link to another link on http://intheboatshed.net/ the other day

and came across this blog http://ilur.tumblr.com/  

I instantly recognised it as a local boat I had been admiring over the summer

in and out of Union Hall. The blog follows her full build and continuing work

by a guy who seems to be heading down a similar route to a life in dept to

boats as I am.

Enjoy

Thanks for posting a link to my blog by the way and hope you don't 

mind me copying this very pretty picture from yours. Keep up the

good work.

The naked truth

Well you can guess what I did this evening, It took 3 solid hours and my
shoulder won't work for a few days now but one side is almost completely
striped of paint. Better yet I found nothing unexpected for a change and it
seems the planking is in pretty good order. Ken can scrape the other side
though.

Planking looks good

3"x 4" galvanised angle iron pieces spread the weight over the width of the keel

Gap between ballast and keel, It is slowly closing

We caught this on the boat the other day, pretty cool

Ballast on

We got the ballast fitted this morning. We tried torching on felt to the plaster
we had faired the ballast off with but it keep flaking off so we just chipped it
off and torched the felt straight on to the iron. A bit of shuffling about with the
forklift and we had it in place.
We had the keel bolts put through the ballast before we lifted it to place so
we then just had push them through the keel with a car jack, put on the metal
plates, washers and torque up the nuts.
There is a small gap between the aft end of the ballast and the keel as we still
don't have the fore and aft bolts made, so we decided not to bother setting her
up to her water line until they are made and fitted as it will involve lifting the
boat over head on the forklift to fit them. The problem is that the ballast
casting is not perfectly flat and the bottom of the keel is, so the only solution is
to bolt it all up tight. In the mean time weight of the boat is now sitting on the
ballast so that will hopefully help it settle in place.

Sorry for the poor quality pics, I forgot my camera.