The Monsoons are here

Over the past week it has rained three days... for the desert, that's a lot... and the road crew has been laying in a new road for us out in front of the house. Now I can walk outside in my bare feet (I hate shoes) to fetch the dogs. The heavy equipment used to level and fill the low spots is long gone. The road is interlocking concrete brick, and instead of a muddy lake for a front yard, we have this. There's now a gentle slope running to the adjoining street to carry away the monsoon. Hurricane Dolly just came ashore near Brownsville and is pushing a lot of clouds our way. That's all we'll get from it. It's too far away.
In other news, I have a dinghy tied up to the dock
that is slowly (sometimes quickly) filling with rainwater and I need to go bail out that thing every couple of days even though it won't sink, but the stuff in it will float away.
I want to buzz out to the Flash today and start clearing the work yard of boat bits, get some plywood hauled up and get a workbench set up in the boat. I won't get all that done, but it will be cooler today with the overcast and light rain we have now. Humidity? 100% (It's always 100% when it rains, I'm told.)

The crane and pulley doing the job.

It takes longer than you think

You see this little pulley? I spent the entire day putting this up. Of course I had to install the steel crossmenber for the pulley too... but all day?
It's through-bolted on the steel beam, and I wanted it to swivel so I had to design and make that part, too. It's designed to handle steel cable going through it, so I can start using the electric winches to bring stuff to the work area inside the boat... and it's also designed to handle fairly heavy loads- up to about 500 pounds. So I guess I didn't do too bad today. Also it rained twice and that felt great...

I noticed a gold car cruising past the Flash a couple of times and it was sitting at the intersection as I was leaving for the day. I thought it was suspicious... so I caught up with him and started taking his picture. There's a few things I wouldn't want to have to replace
out there... here he is.
If you see this car cruising your neighborhood, you must be in Mexico too! Carumba!

A day out of the sun, time for design

Click on the drawing for larger version

This is the direction I'm headed on this boat.
I know it has a lot of windows, but I plan on using Lexan- the bulletproof plastic they use in limousines and bank windows, etc.
The First Mate has a thing about cramped, dark places and so do I. The drawings, are by the way, pretty close to scale. Comments welcome.

Progress of sorts

The larger the boat, the larger the infrastructure required to work on it.

I've been splitting my time between actual boat work and improving the working conditions... and sometimes these two dovetail nicely. Today I tore off part of the deck that covered the chainplates (chainplates are heavily built stainless plates used to anchor the wires that hold up the mast). These are bolted to bulkheads using eight 1/2 inch steel bolts (each) through two plates about 3/8 to 1/2 inch thick (each) with the bulkhead sandwiched in the middle (2 inches of marine plywood). They're really strong, 'cause they have to be.

So I took some structural steel I bought at the local scrapyard and bolted through the chainplates. They are the vertical beams in this photo. These will hold up the shadecloth and provide attachment points for cranes used to A) lift materials onto the boat B) move stuff around once it's up on the boat and C) maybe support a corrugated steel roof if the shadecloth doesn't give me enough protection from the sun. I should mention the top edge of the hull is about 12 feet off the ground. It requires 2 shadecloths to cover it- each one is 16 feet wide by 24 feet long. The blue tarp over the workbench area is 20x10 feet. I still have another steel scaffold to build, and will split my time up on that project too.

Resistance is Futile

Back to the GREEN FLASH to remove the coaming/cockpit this morning. Cheese croissants only a faint but pleasant memory.

This is a picture of the wireless controller for the crane on the back of my pickup truck. The 5 peso coin is there to show scale... (you don't know how big a 5 peso is, eh? (evil chuckle) OK, then... A 5 peso coin is the same size as a US quarter. I just don't have any US quarters here because nobody takes US coins for payment in Mexico (although I've seen beggars asking for them). I keep all my US coins in a 55 gallon drum on the other side of the border. As I drive across the border I throw whatever US coins I have accumulated into the barrel. Nobody can lift it so I'm not worried about it.

Back to the FLASH- I hoisted up the old cockpit onto the starboard side of the boat until it teetered there, then I propped it up with some 2x4s so I could disconnect the hoists. (I didn't want this thing to pull the entire boat over because it was still attached to the boat by way of the hoists).

The one remaining line was connected to the electric winch on the truck, so I could stand up on the boat and control the process using the remote.

I found I could edge the thing over an inch at a time by just tapping the remote... so everything kinda went in slow motion before it fell. And fall it did... so now I can concentrate on getting some serious shade on the FLASH, get all the junk out to the junkyard, and get the small bits of rotted boat cleaned out.

Feels good to be this far along right now.

And I gotta' thank Mike and Cynthia (see First Mate blog) for a great dinner at Los Barcos last night. The shrimp tacos were wonderful. We were squeezing Italians into our little car and tried to thank them before we drove off, but the moment was a bit chaotic.

Pastries and heavy lifting

I'm not ready to start bringing workers onto the boat yet... I am dismantling the previous owners' work on it, cutting off rotting decks and cabin tops. This stuff is really heavy- about an inch of plywood with a half inch of fiberglass & resin, plus framing and hardware. So I've been using a series of hoists, and rope and pulleys to move it around. It's too heavy for me to lift so I need the mechanical advantage of levers and blocks. Today I had hoped to remove the remaining cabin top/coaming from the FLASH. The piece is large and no longer attached by anything but gravity. I propped it up with 2x4s and attached the crane from the pickup to one corner with the idea of rolling it off the boat.

Everything was lined up perfectly and then just before I pressed the button on the wireless remote for the crane, the First Mate drove up with a bag of cheese-filled croissants. My concentration on the pastries, I hit the button and the cabin slid sideways into the boat.

With the croissants in hand, I locked up the work area and headed home for a cold shower and air conditioning and ice water... as Arnie would say, "I'll be BOCK!"

BTW, it's too late for pictures of the croissants.

The work goes on...

We are getting into the real heat of Mexico summer. The First Mate took my photo as I was leaving for the Green Flash... here's the summer fashion for this morning: cut off sweat pants, tank top, cheap but sturdy sandals, iPod, kerchief headband to keep the sweat out of eyes, super-dark sunglasses (prescription). What you can't see is the sheen of spray-on sunblock by Banana Boat (great idea), but you can see the sheen of sweat already starting at 6 am.

The sun comes up early here- we're on the eastern edge of the combined Mountain/Pacific daylight savings time.

Over the past couple of days, I've been putting up more vertical supports and using them to haul the cut-up deck sections off the FLASH using block and tackle systems. I also built a frame for the front gate to the area.
Later today I'll haul up four deep cycle 6 volt batteries and build a battery bank in the bathtub. I'll rig the wind generator to this bank and run a 2000 watt inverter to power my electrical tools and lights if I should need them. I also have an Onan 4kw generator and a Honda 2000, but if I can work without the noise and the cost of gasoline, I'm happier... plus I can hook up my stereo and listen to my favorite music if I want. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to get the 12 volt fridge fixed?

Yet another "Before" picture of the GREEN FLASH. The bathtub circled in red.