Railings and oak

Railings and oak

Hello!

Here we go, the push to sea has started. We have now a new railing in the fore of the boat. This is to prevent people from falling overboard and for fixing portside and starboard “lifelines”, the ropes you can harness to. We have the epoxy primer and antifoul for painting the boat below waterline. We finally have custom sails! With the possibility of reefing the mainsail! We never had a reefable mainsail before. That is exciting. We even have a liferaft and a ton of other equopment to get us certified and all legal. Right now, Kvark does not exist de jure, a problem for the state, obviously. Unfortunately we have to get Kvark registered as a category C sailboat. Categories B and A will cost 5k EUR at least, plus a ton of time.

Next up will be painting, fixing rigging the gear to the boat, transporting and … sea! We discovered some bare oak under the keel when washing off freshwater gunk from the hull. That is a bit of a concern. But as Joosep put it: the keel is meant to get it rough. So we are simply going to paint over it, fingers crossed. Here are pictures:

: It was time to put my welder back in action. It had a toasted winding. Oh, and the welder now has a soft-start circuit. No more blown fuses due to inductive overloads.

: So I replaced the toasted winding with a better than ever new winding.

: That is almost how the railing started out: a windscreen holder for a powerboat. Here, some pieces have been removed.

: A bit of work and voila, handrails are on the way.

: A trick learned from “weldingtipsandtricks” YouTube chanel. AISI316L is very prone to warping when welded. A lot of the warp can be avoided if one uses a massive metal element to draw away welding heat. In this case it is a slab of steel.

: Another trick I learned from watching YouTube videos. Joining steel pipe is a lot easier with a little hidden sleeve. It auto-aligns the pipe and prevents burning holes into the joint when welding.

: Nice little handles for attaching rope to.

: New handrail installed with AISI316L bolts and of course bad-ass marine Sikaflex adhesive.

: I put up the mast with help from my brother to check whether the handrail would interfere with one of the stays. It did not!

: Ever so often you get lucky and drill into a screw. Fortunately I was able to excavate this one and remove it with very little damage. Maybe it’d be wise to metal-detect an area before starting to drill it? There are hundreds of screws in the boat.

: Installing the fore-handrail was a bit of a pain due to the tight opening through which I had to tighten bolts.

: The lovely oak mast-rotator handle. I hope to deploy it this season 🙂

: A mockup of the “hold on” mini-handrail, whcih connects the fore and aft handrails via rope.

: A panorama view of the rope-handrail setup.

: Little shells, 1 mm size at most. But definitely shells. All from three months on an inline lake.

: A bit of scrubbing got rid of the gunk.

: Bare oak at the keel. This is a bit of a problem that we have decided to neglect by simply painting over it with a few layers of epoxy paint. More maintenance will come later, in the winter.