New Coaming Fitted

Today the new coaming strips received their final fettling and were screwed in place using new Silicon Bronze dome headed screws. The aft coaming strip is still being worked on and will be fitted next. The top edge of the new coaming is currently rough cut and will require planing smooth and routing off to a soft round top edge.

Fettling the new coaming strips

New coaming strips screwed home

New aft coaming strip being fitted

That's summer over with

With many volunteers otherwise occupied over the summer months and a delay in accessing our new storage facility restoration work has been minimal for a while. Summer is now pretty over for most people so OHBS activities are picking up once again. While we await access to our new storage facility some work has continued at Ian Richardson's yard in Stromness. 

Work has resumed on Saga with the main effort now focused on fitting new coaming boards. The old coaming boards were deemed too badly worn once they had been cleaned up.

Old & new coaming boards

Tricky joint at the front

Trimming up at the back

The old coaming boards were used on the inside of the new coaming boards during the fit up so that the clamps didn't mark the new boards.

Anyone know where the vac is?

The Problem with Birds...

when they get inside a shed is that they leave a mess just about everywhere. Birds have been nesting in one of the sheds in which we have some of our boats stored. Rather than evict the nesting birds we instead left them undisturbed and covered all our boats with thin plastic sheeting. The trailers and other equipment will still need washing off at some point.

Some of the mess

Laverne recovered 

Laverne recovered

While covering the boats we noticed that some of the trailer tyres had deflated so these were blocked up and reinflated to help maintain their shape.

Before

After

Nothing going on this week...

 

Change of location

Instead of one group working on Saga in one shed and another group working in another shed we all got together to work in one place for a change. This allowed us to make some progress with fitting of a new thaft to Linda and some sucking of teeth about the fitting of a new thaft to Waterlily.

Fitting a new thaft to Linda

A partly fitted new thaft on Linda

It's the Sailing Season...

With the arrival of the sailing season several OHBS volunteers have been occupied getting their boats ready for the season which has meant an interruption to restoration activities. However, we managed to restart work today both on Saga and cleaning & painting work at the Ness site.

Removing broken screws on Saga

 

After cutting out a number of broken screws from the deck framing and plugging the holes we test fitted the original coaming to see how things were shaping up. Not too good. Something has changed shape (not unusual) and the original coaming boards no longer fitted snugly, we had 10mm gaps in a couple of places so onto plan B = fit new coaming boards.

Test fitting the original coaming boards

Working on Nellie

Work is continuing on the ex-steam launch Nellie. A lot of time has been spent cleaning out the interior of Nellie which had suffered from years of coal dust, oil and salt water being ground into the bilge area. With the cleaning phase over, focus has shifted to painting. Much of the interior has now been painted and some of the deck level wood work has been stripped and re-varnished.

Nellie interior

Nellie interior

Nellie spent much of her time while on the water moored to a buoy. This meant that she rocked or rolled in any waves that hit her from the side. A previous owner fitted a wheel on an axle to a bilge pump which meant that the rolling motion had the benefit of pumping the bilge out.

Nellie bilge pump wheel