Maunie emerges gleaming - and our work begins again

On Wednesday afternoon a very shiny Maunie emerged from the paint shop and into the light. We are absolutely bowled over by the Awlgrip paint finish; Andy the painter is really an artist with a spray gun and she looks like new. Gone are the scratches, abrasions and other imperfections of 30,000 miles of voyaging, replaced by a completely smooth surface and a really deep shine. These photos don't really do it justice...

We now moved back into the big shed to take over the next bit of the project - putting her back together again over the next couple of weeks. As you can see from the last photo, there are some important bits to replace onto her stern but the really big challenge that we face is to refit all the deck fittings. The new deck is all but complete, with just some minor finishing work to take place next week, so we used the templates that we'd carefully made to identify the position of all the bolt holes, took a deep breath and fired up the drill!

The first task was to drill the holes for the feet of the pulpit...

… followed by the cleats and other foredeck fittings. Note the vital kneeling pad!

We used a good tip we'd been told about and drilled all the bolt holes 1mm smaller than the thread size; that way we were able to cut a thread through the polymer deck material which adds a further level of protection from water ingress. Of course, we added Sikaflex sealant / adhesive to complete the waterproofing so Di spent a happy couple of hours carefully applying masking tape around each fitting to prevent the black sealant from spoiling the look of the decks.

Blue gloves on for the Sikaflex - a ring around each bolt hole, followed by additional lines to bed down the fitting onto the deck. The felt pen marks on the fibreglass were used to locate the templates that we used to locate the drill holes.

Screwing in the bolts. Though we re-used the old fittings, the new stainless steel bolts have Allen-key socket heads which look neater and are much easier to undo than the old slot heads (should we ever need to remove them, which we hope we won't!)

The modified stanchion bases that Graham designed look great but have been a bit of a challenge to fit. Getting the bolt holes to line up has been an interesting challenge but we now have 6 out of 14 in place, sealed and bolted. We think they should work really well.

The first base in place and masked up, ready for sealant. You can see the grain effect of the Tek Dek and the very neat, no-caulking fit against the fibreglass of the bulwark.

After two and a half days of very hard work, we were glad to be heading home for the weekend (especially as it absolutely tanked it down with rain all day today). When we next go back to Maunie we will continue with the deck work and also have the prospect of a full day (or more) of applying new Coppercoat antifouling. Living the dream, as they say!