Friday, 27 June 2025

It's getting windy

 The steam engine from the steam launch Nellie has been cleaned up and re-painted.

Paint work on the Yachting World catamaran Venture continues.

Outside clean up work on Nellie's steam boiler has been started.

Saga painting is almost complete. The boom now requires stripping and revarnishing and there are some more fittings to be reinstalled including the rudder mounts. 



Friday, 20 June 2025

Steady Progress

 The OHBS sign board by the entrance door has been given a clean up, re-oil and varnish.

Inside re-painting of the stripped upper boards and stern board of Saga has been started.

Work on Laverne continues.



Friday, 13 June 2025

Sunny but windy

We are preparing Saga by sanding off the top planks ready for paint to be applied. These planks have been painted once but we needed to strip them back when fixing the new rubbing strake to the boat.

Stripping of old paint continues on Laverne.

Elsewhere we are thinking about what to do next...

We had several visitors today.

After a tour they joined us for coffee.




Friday, 6 June 2025

Just carrying on

The hardwood runners on which Saga's centreboard rollers ran have now been reinstalled. Next we will reattach the mechanism used to raise the centreboard.

Outside the rings used to support the heavy duty rope of our safety fence have been painted as they were rusting.

The Yachting World catamaran Venture is now getting painted with a top coat.



Friday, 30 May 2025

Another Nice Day

The dinghy Saga was originally fitted with a 6 mm steel centreboard which is lowered and raised without a pivot using a pair of rollers and blocks to take the weight. We do not want the weight of the original steel centreboard sitting inside the now fragile hull so we have made up a ply replica which is a lot lighter.


Fitting the new centreboard

Friday, 16 May 2025

Field Trip

The weather continues to be better than average so a few members made an outing to check on some of the historic vessels stored in a separate boat shed in Stromness. On our way back we stopped off at Ian Richardson's Boat Shed to view his latest build. Ian is building an elliptical stern yole in between all the other repair work being undertaken in his shed.





Friday, 2 May 2025

Ordinary Day

Saga's restored helm seat is back in the hull.

The next job for Saga is to replace the centre board. The original centre board is 6.5mm steel which is a bit on the heavy side for an aging hull out of the water so we plan to construct a ply look-a-like which will be a lot lighter.

Interestingly Saga's centre board doesn't have a pivot point, instead it relies on a set of rollers and its position in the centre board case.

Elsewhere in the workshop Venture received undercoat.