Big smacky hammer fit.

Well, it fits, kind-of, but only when it’s ‘persuaded’ to do so with my big smacky club hammer.

Pathfinder progress……one step forward, two steps back, rinse and repeat.

Many of you will be familiar with the concept that for a given unit of time you can get a given amount of work done , lets say that for a boat at home, with all the materials and tools to hand, that one unit of time equals one unit of useful work. We know that the amount of work goes down when the boat is in a boatyard because of the amount of time it takes to get there, park, start the job and then realize that the critical tool or material is on the bench at home. For many ‘boaters’ who hang around boatyards the amount of work can also drop to zero when one of your boatyard ‘friends’ drops by for a chat……several hours later, coffee drunk and no useful work done but at least you’ve had a nice sociable chat with the old boy who will be ‘just finishing a couple of jobs’ and ‘heading off to the Baltic later this year’ !

Well, this week I had to wait for 2 days of heavy rain plus strong gales to finish before I roll the boat out and have another go at ‘measuring the hole’ for a 4 sided gaff mainsail. Not sure how I got it wrong but when I checked against designer John Welsford’s drawings my measurements seemed a bit off. I did actually make a small but critical measurement mistake by not getting my datum points right up in the angle of the throat of the gaff so…..

So, yesterday, nice day aside from heavy showers. I pulled the boat out again and this time attached all three of my tape measures to the gaff jaws, peak and tack point, created a P.I.S or ‘point in space for the clew and measured up for the sail, properly this time I hope. I also filmed it so I spent a fair amount of time running in and out of the house to check my ‘takes’…..aside from the trash truck going past, one neighbor drilling masonry and the local zoo (primary school) letting the animals out I did eventually get what should have been a half hour’s job for a sailmaker done……it only took 7 hours but a lot of that was taken up by setting up shots, changing batteries, downloading my video clips and so on.

My lesson of the week is that filming a job reduces the useful work done by about a factor of ten times.

Oh….and in the middle of all of that the young gofer from the steel fabricator turned up for the third attempt to get the drawbar brackets to fit the drawbar. The story here is that several weeks ago I thought I could finish getting the whole trailer and boat ready to go out on the road and to be able to wet-launch using a long drawbar extension. So…I made a pair of nice plywood patterns, did some reasonably good technical drawings and made some crucial notes – for example that the 50mm square section drawbar had to be a sliding fit in the brackets being made. This week, in the first of 2 days of heavy heavy rain we picked up the brackets and got them home and that evening the rain eased up so I went out to fit them and they weren’t even close to being a fit…..not even with a hammer.

So….it’s three days later and the gofer has been and gone three times, the last time taking their brackets and my drawbar to their yard and ‘persuading’ one to fit the other.

Well, they fit, kind-of, but only when persuaded to do so at home with my big smacky club hammer. Honestly it’s a piss-poor job and even my engineer mate down in NZ had words to say about the ‘quality’ of the welding.

So…..one week’s work, measuring for a sail, ‘fitting’ the drawbar and mucking out the workshop !, yes, it’s dark and damp in there because it needs a new roof and the electrics all blew out during the last gale…..bit tidier though.

How was your week ?

This week’s rigging video.