Sunday, March 24, 2013

Cuddy Cabin is almost complete...needs paint

I have not gotten much work done on the boat in the last month.  I was away on a business trip out to San Francisco for about 3 weeks.  I had a great time and cant wait to get back!  Probably one of my favorite places in the USA.

Here I am at Alcatraz Island overlooking San Francisco.  Wind was fierce.
 Here is the view from my hotel overlooking San Francisco bay.  The marina across the street is a great place to take a walk.

Someone remind me again why I live in a swamp full of mosquitos called Florida?  Oh, the fishing right.

Well, after not doing much of anything for a few days after I got back home, I did get a few things done.

I filled all the seams and screwholes inside the cuddy with some glass microballons and epoxy and gave it a sanding.  Now the entire interior of the cuddy cabin is ready for paint.  The only problem was when went to paint this morning all my paint had turned to rubber.  This is Glidden Poly Porch paint...I had been keeping it in a gallon plastic jug for ease of pouring, however, when I went to use it this morning it was like jelly.  The cap was on tight, so I dont know why it happened.  Oh well, $22 at Home Depot tomorrow will fix this....


Here is the interior ready for final paint:


Well since the paint was dried up, I decided to fiberglass the top of the cuddy cabin roof.  First I promptly cut two large piece of fiberglass cloth slightly too small (Dad always said measure twice cut once).  So I recut two more to the right size.

I spent some time getting them to cover the roof the way I wanted it, with overhang all the way around. Then, because it was so windy, I pour out some epoxy and used the spreader to cover around 70% of the top with epoxy.  This allowed the glass cloth to stay in position, and allowed me to trim around all 4 sides to get about a 2 inch over hang.

After that I just mixed, spread and repeat.  With the exception of almost falling into the epoxy while I was trying to lean over to far...it went pretty quick and smooth!
 Here is the roof after putting enough epoxy on to hold the cloth in place
 Here is the overhang before trimming to about 2 inches.
Here is the cuddy roof all glassed in.  You can't even see my handprint where I almost did a face dive into it...epoxy fixes all problems.

Next up is to get some paint and paint the interior of the cuddy.  Then I will have to get more MDO plywood to start building the Pilot House!