long delay, little work

The past few weekends haven't been terribly productive. This weekend a little progress was made.

First, I uncovered the boat. I took a picture but the image came out over exposed. Something about having a bright noonday sun shining into the front of a camera with a dark hulled sailboat in the foreground. Its the super bright gleaming awlgrip cabin top. Yeah, that's it. The paint is so good I can only take pictures in low light conditions.

Anyway, the boat looked cleaner than normal under the cover which was nice. A little chafe up around the bow but generally in good condition. The Awlcraft 2000 topside paint is considerably softer than Awlgrip and scratches easily which I am not happy about. It DOES repair much easier than Awlgrip which I AM happy about. Its a tradeoff I guess.

So, the last project was sealing up the undersides of the countertops. I took the parts out today and laid them back in for final fitting and sanding. I stopped short of building the top step because after a few weeks kicking around in the basement I was a bit unsure of the markings I had left to align it all up and wanted to double check the construction.

I lined up the top step perfectly symmetrical to the two lower steps. The problem is, it just doesn't look right.

The step is the exact same height, alignment, and size as the two lower steps but it just doesn't look right. I figured I could take off some of the edges so it didn't look so intrusive but still. It is perfectly symmetrical to the lower steps but looks all wrong.

So I thought maybe I would set it lower, just an inch about the top of the countertop.

Nope. It still didn't look right.

So I laid the step directly on the countertop.

Now it looked better. I tried going up and down the steps several times and you can definitely tell the difference in height on the first step. But somehow it still seems better.

Finally, I just took away the step and ran up and down the steps a few more times using the countertop itself as the top step. There is no symmetry but it feels great. Very weird. For now I am going to forget the step. Unfortunately I was counting on that step to cover up some minor misalignments between the outside and center sections. Oh well.

In amongst this abstract design process, two coats of bilgekote white paint were applied to the inside of the galley lockers. No pictures. Who wants to see the inside of a white box anyway?

Before I ended the day I set the galley drop box in place to check the fit before I epoxy sealed and painted it. Considering how cattywampus everything in the boat is, it fit quite well. Note: the box is only loosely in place and in the picture isn't sitting exactly perfectly in place. It really does fit. Honest.

and that's it. No distractions are in the plan for next weekend so fingers crossed for more progress.

Laters Taters ;-)