Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Portlights/deadlights/bulkhead of doom.

We bought our marine grade plywood in Jersey, at 98.00 for fir faced in 3/4 inches in a four by eight piece we felt like we got a pretty darn good deal. We're not ready to put it in yet, not till next weekend, but the lumber yard has funny hours so we wanted to be sure we could get there while they were open.

This weekend the main order of business was to finally sort out those windows. Matt had tried sheets of acrylic held up with just 4200 but we didn't allow enough time for it to set and they popped off under test pressure. We went back to lowe's and bought stainless steel bolts nuts and washers, large sheets of lexan at 68 dollars a sheet, and polyurethane caulk. We also had to search high and low for butyl tape. Wound up going to some huge crazy rv superstore in Swedesboro to find it.

Matt used a router to cut the windows to size (I think this has to be the third batch of windows he cut out) and we held them in place and drilled through the lexan and the fiberglass, then lined the holes on the cabin with the butyl tape, bolted the lexan in place over that and finger tightened the bolts to compress the butyl tape into a gasket. He used the butyl tape to make little gaskets for each individual bolt. Then we put masking tape around the windows and applied the polyurethane caulk. By that time it was after ten pm, and pitch black. We're hoping everything is OK down there, as we were too afraid to put the tarp back over the cabin for fear of it getting into the caulk and making a huge mess.

The bulkhead should be the next order of business, and from everything we read on the Grampian owner's website we can do it with the mast up if we loosen all the stays.
Can't wait for Saturday so we can find out how things are holding up . . .

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