Nugland

Not super quickly, though. (I have been in Atlanta and am heading out tonight for St. Augustine.)

I did manage to knock out the leather covering for four of the nine shrouds. I now have a proper leather hole-punch, so it went a lot smoother than the forestay. I was learning as I did them so the quality varies a little. By the last one, I figured out one main thing: the sail-maker’s twine doesn’t hold knots very well.

A way around that was to finish the covering of the loop with a decent length of twine left, and to use that twine to stitch the covering over the nicopress fitting.

The standing rigging on the Centennial was (partially) fashioned in the traditional way, that is: with loops on the end of the shrouds that go over the masts, rather than modern fittings and shackles.

The shrouds are modern, though, in that they are made of stainless steel cable, and that creates an issue: the shrouds can be hard on the masts, and a bit noisy.

The Loys came up with the solution of lacing leather over them, and we’re continuing that style. I got a big bag of pigskin scraps and we’re lacing that over the loops. I really like how they look (click pic for more).

Long term, I’ll be tempted to figure out a shackle-based attachment scheme that includes turnbuckles (especially since we’re not obliged to drop the masts every year).

Sam, Mark and Nicole laying it down.

I was happy on Saturday. I invited friends to come and help start painting of Centennial’s hull, and almost everyone showed up. We got a ton of work done on Saturday, including: sanding all of the topsides, cleaning them with pre-paint (MEK), and getting a coat of primer on them.

It went well, but the primer was a little annoying (it was thick and dried too quickly). Joanna and I went back on Sunday (by ourselves) and were able to get the second coat on. For that, we experimented with thinning the primer and discovered that a consistency somewhere between whole milk and heavy cream was perfect.

You had to watch for drips, but the coverage was excellent (and painless). The technique changed, though; you roll first then cut right away, but also smooth out the rolled area with the brush. With the right amount of thinner added, the brush strokes just disappear.

Technical details:
Primer: Interlux Pre-Kote
Thinner: Interlux Brushing Liquid 303
Cleaner: Methyl Ethyl Ketone
Sandpaper: 80 grit

So, the boat has 20 years of paint on it. And it’s green. I really like green (it is easily the dominant color in my wardrobe), but not on Centennial for some reason. And I wanted to give her a fresh start on Lake Erie.

I knew that the job of sanding all that paint off would drag all through the summer (and be a drag generally), so I resolved to get her soda-blasted and in the water during 2009. A little expensive (it costs more than the paint, actually), but, from what I’ve read in my research, quick and very effective.

Now that I’ve had a day’s exposure to the process, I’m really glad I didn’t try a DIY solution. Turns out that the paint on Centennial is pretty serious stuff. Even switching to glass beads, it would have taken several days to remove all of the green paint, and the many layers of salt-water bottom paint had the dude from Blasterclean shaking his head. It also billowed out of the tent he made, which made me nervous about the yard getting on my case. And it inflamed my sinuses. Blech.

There’ll still be quite a bit of green paint on her when we start repainting, but it’ll be green paint that wouldn’t come off with glass bead blasting, so I figure it’ll make a fine surface. And I’m going with some high-quality black stuff, so coverage will not be an issue.

The pic is also a link to the other pictures.

We made it back to the Centennial last weekend. We got the leeboards off and set up on sawhorses in anticipation of the soda-blasting happening on Tuesday. Thursday looks more likely now, what with rain forecast until then.

The four new sawhorses are from Harbor Freight. They seem very sturdy, and were only $15 each, but each one had 26 bolts, 26 nuts, and 8 wood screws that had to dealt with. That got old fast.

The leeboards weren’t that bad to deal with. They are pretty heavy, and the hardware was a little balky. That said, leeboards have to be tons less of a hassle than a centerboard.

All the paint, topsides and bottom, is now in hand or on the way. Things should get underway Saturday morning, sharpish. Anyone who wants to help with the painting can contact me or leave a message here.

We went down to see Centennial over the long weekend. It took a while, but we were able to remove all of the lines (not ropes, there are no ropes on a proper boat) from the mast and the hull.

They were dirty and stiff from being set up and unused for, oh, four years, in a New Hampshire driveway. They were under cover, so they at least weren’t sun-damaged.

The plan — now finished — was to wash them with laundry detergent and then rinse them with softener, and it seems to have worked. All the halyards feel, well, not brand new, but supple. The topping lifts are still a little stiff but perfectly serviceable. All are noticeably brighter.

I’m really glad the Loys took the care with these lines that they did. Replacing these would have been a big expense, what as decent running rigging costs somewhere between 50¢ and $1.50 a foot. Some of the longer halyards are over 200 feet long.

Quickey inventory:

• Jib Halyard
• Forestaysail Halyard
• Topsail Halyard
• Main Peak Halyard
• Main Throat Halyard
• Mizzen Staysail Halyard
• Mizzen Peak Halyard
• Mizzen Throat Halyard
• Assorted signal halyards
• Lazyjacks (not all salvageable)
• Leeboard lifts (didn’t require washing, actually)

Click the pic for a mini-gallery.

Next up: Inventory the sheets and the reserve cordage, then prep for soda-blasting (which should happen next Monday, June 1st).

[Update] Tuesday, June 2nd (weather permitting)

LeBron James makes playing professional basketball look like fun. I haven’t seen that in like, forever.

Addenda: “Chuck just pulled your hamstring”

It appears that he’s worried about ‘distractions’, and would like it if all the people like me who assumed that all the secret stuff that Bush & Co. did would eventually see the light of day would, like, chill.

Um, fuck that. Seriously, fuck that.

The following appears in all-caps for emphasis:

THE TRUTH IS NEVER A DISTRACTION. IT IS WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PAYING ATTENTION TO.

Realism might return when, what should we call it? False-ism? is exposed.

People like me will be happy to put the Bush administration policies behind us only when they are exposed, punished if that is required, and explicitly disavowed by the current administration if they are found to be illegal, immoral, dishonest, or stupid. Or all four. Until then, they need to be paid attention to.

I fueled up the Primus No.523 and gave it a go. And it worked great with no fancy repair work. The pressure pump could probably use an overhaul, but it did the business. I’m quite pleased.

I wasn’t organized enough to do a BTU test last night, but I’ll get to it. It seemed to be putting out quite a bit of heat, though.

This beauty arrived from Australia today. I think it might be pre-war, but there isn’t much info to go on. I got it on eBay from Australia (at a pretty reasonable price, too).

Let’s just call it Bacon Flu and be done with it.

Everyone loves bacon, right?

Meinke Marina West in Curtice, Ohio, to be exact. I nailed down slip B-106, which seems like a nice one. It includes water and electricity for a whopping $675.00 a year. Hauling the boat off the Brownell trailer (and onto these blocks) set me back all of $108.

Now I have to get the paint removed, then paint it afresh. Then to the water. Wow.

And headed for Curtice, Ohio. We’ll meet up with it in a few hours.

We’ve been buying up a bunch of odds and ends that happen to celebrate various centennials. A little cutesy, yeah, but it has provided some amusement. Here’s a link to pictures of most of the stuff. Enjoy?

I was able to complete my CG-1258 and include notarized copies of CG-1270 and CG-1340 (and a $92 check). On their way to the Coast Guard now.

(Dang, I own a boat.)

I own that. It’ll be here (well, in Ohio) on the 29th.

We mixed up and fried some onion bhajis on Sunday. Wow, were they tasty.

I’ve been scoping out kerosene stoves for eventual use on a sailboat, and I keep coming across various BTU ratings for them.

A little investigation reveals that the unit they are really talking about is “BTUs per hour”. A single BTU, according to Wikipedia:

A BTU is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by one degree from 60° to 61° Fahrenheit at a constant pressure of one atmosphere.

All this talk of BTUs for stoves was fine for comparing one stove to another, but what I was really curious about is how my cheesy little kitchen stove compared to a kerosene stove. I decided to try and measure the effective BTUs of my favorite burner.

Experiment-wise, I figured that I could provide the one pound of water, and that I had the equipment suitable for measuring time and temperature (as long as the temperature change was large enough). And one atmosphere of pressure was roughly available here in Ann Arbor (850 feet above sea-level).

I was going to have to fudge the whole “60° to 61° Fahrenheit” thing, what as I wasn’t expecting my cute wireless meat thermometer to be that precise.

The procedure I settled on was to pre-heat the burner (on high), then pre-heat the pan I was going to use (so that the burner wouldn’t be heating the pan so much as heating the water).

Then I would take the (starting) temperature of the water. At that point I would pour the water in the pan and start a timer.

I decided to let the timer run for two minutes, hoping that the temperature change would be large, but not push the temp too close to boiling (where things get all latent-y). Pouring out the water and measuring the final temperature would give me all the data I needed.

The final temperature did flirt with boiling at 170º, so one minute would have probably been a wiser choice, but I figure that I got away with two minutes. The math at that point is pretty simple:

(Final temperature minus starting temperature) times 30 = effective BTUs per hour.
(170 - 56) * 30 = 3,420

(If I — or you — were to use one minute instead of two, ‘times 30′ would become ‘times 60′.)

I am aware of the fact that I strayed 110º away from the 61º that is the official reference, but am willing to live with that. Switching to one minute would get me closer to something more scientific, but I like that large temperature change for its measurability.

The big take-away from the experiment? Well, I’m guessing that the burner I was testing is rated somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 BTUs/hour, but I was able to get less than half of that into the water. Interesting. I wonder where the larger figures come from?

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some Kerosene burners to test. Leave a comment here if you come up with any interesting numbers of your own, thanks.

Extras:

There are 3.41 BTUs per hour in 1 watt, which means that my burner was getting around 1,003 watts of energy into the water. Sounds about right.

A little overdone, but I was aiming for being able to see the details that were in the pic.

I’ve been spending some time thinking about all of the sail options for the gaff-rigged ketch Centennial, which was designed by Ted Brewer for the Loy family in the late 1970s.

It’s a traditional rig, so my theorizing may apply to other similarly rigged ketches, but it is a leeboard shallow-draft sharpie, so it may not really compare to the heavier displacement, full-keel boats that typically carry such rigs.

She has three primary sails: (clubbed) forestaysail, gaff main and gaff mizzen, with two reefs available in the gaff sails and one in the staysail. Additionally, there is a large mizzen staysail, a main topsail and a jib topsail.
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