2012 Winter Work: Aft Hatch & Boom Rigging

This post pertains to the work I performed on a few projects I performed on Great Ketch during the 2011-2012 winter months of December, January, February, and March.

Hatch Recondition:

The picture on the left displays the reconditioned hatches. The aft hatch was reconditioned during the winter of 2012 and bow hatch was reconditioned during the winter of 2011. Both hatches originally had .5 Lexan, which were severely crazed. The Lexan lens were replaced with smoke acrylic. The new dark gray acrylic lens with new varnish will help bring a classy traditional look back. The teak was redone with 5 coats of varnish after applying MASepoxy.





Boom Rigging:

Car with plastic endcaps

The bearings in the Ronstan traveling cars, which run on a track on the boom, fell out. The cars are used to control the outhaul adjustments and the reefing adjustments. After many years of use, the plastic end caps have lost their integrity to hold form and split apart; afterwards the bearings soon spilled onto the deck of the boat.

Because Ronstan no longer sells the plastic end caps, new caps had to be fabricated from a two part solution plastic mix solution in order to make a cast. In making the new end caps, the old caps were glued together to make a mold. The mold was used to pour liquid plastic to make new end caps. This process allowed for many new plastic end caps to be made as spares; a mini warehouse of plastic end caps. Rather than having to spend $350 per new car, as Ronstan suggested, the fabrication of new end caps were less than $50. New bearings were aquired from a Sailrite.

Close up of the plastic end caps

All plastic caps were lightly sanded, cleaned, primed, and painted with gloss black topside boot stripe paint -- as shown on the picture right.

Block attached to SS padeye

Another improvement made to the rigging on the boom was to fabricate a custom pad-eye that allowed the pad-eye to be located closer to the high point of the radius that is located between the car and the mast. By moving the pad-eye closer to the zenith, the lines running between the car and the pad-eye travel in a straight line. The booms are half wish-boom, they have an arc from mast to end of boom.

All blocks on cars, and brackets on booms were removed and cleaned.