Schucker refit

[brantleychuck]

NO MORE TRIM! I'm pretty stoked, As I was epoxying the bottom and top edge of the pilot house roof together I realized I may not need to re install the rather cheesy, RV style aluminum trim piece that had previously held the top and bottom together and hid the joint fro view.

The gel coat on the side edge of the roof was in pretty bad shape. Especially under the trim piece I was having to sand all the cracking gel coat off. I was fixating a bit on edge as I thought it was a area that defined the lines of the boat and any flaws were sure to catch the eye.
I worked a 2 foot section of the edge with a bit of bondo to see how much work would be involved in prepping the edge for painting and no trim. The great result was easy to achive and IMO will look much better without the trim piece. I believe that as far as how much labor this will take is a even trade off . Win win
Running out of stuff to do so coatings will be going on this week.






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[brantleychuck]

OLD ONAN GENERATOR 7.5. Any use for it?
I pulled this old onan genny out of the boat. Spent a couple hours on it and the dam thing runs and makes power. Coughed and sputtered for 10 minutes then smoothed out, starts easy now. What the hell do I do with it now?




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[brantleychuck]

Photo
Photo
Photo


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[brantleychuck]

Rolled on two coats of awlgrip high build primer today. Had to wait till late pm so surface temps got below 105. F. Thunderstorms skirted me. . May roll on some color tomorrow.
Need a little body work in a couple locations


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[brantleychuck]

Finished the third coat of awlgrip. oyster white yesterday, today is TEXTURE DAY! A lot of work to get here

This photo is after primer coat is on. A two part epoxy, it is the color and consistency of milk, dries clear. Maybe a bit shinier


Now two hours till first coat of Marine Tex


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[brantleychuck]

2 coats of non skid on. Came out perfect

Nice lines


Pilot house roof done


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[CS Cruiser]

Looks great!

[cpa]

Wow! That really does look great. Keep up the good work.

[brantleychuck]

Back working on the boat, big goal was to get the mast back up


Got yin back on the boat using block and tackle . Not to hard. Then got the front up on the chain. Moved boat back and dropped mast into step





Then set up the boom as a gin pole. Lots of safety ropes to steady things. I was working alone. The hardest part was getting the boom in position by myself. Once everything was in place used a chain hoist to pull it



It came up pretty easy , but it I took a lot time, re setting safety lines and generally being very wary of things going sideways.


It got dark on me but got the mast up and secured. Just in time to as it's now pouring rain outside.


. .


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[brantleychuck]

With the mast up I jumped on the next project, rebuilding the forward hatch. The original set up had a large coaming around the hatch opening and a solid fiberglass lid. Then at some point a Bomar type hatch was added using wood trim pieces and silicone to fill in the gaps as the Bomar hatch is 2 inches smaller around all 4 sides



Always a slight hesitation when cutting large pieces off your boat , but I went ahead with the Sawzaa which made quick work of the coming

With the coaming off it became apparent I would need to add support to the deck that the now removed coaming dad previously supplied. I layer in many layers of fiberglass in the exposed channel, this noticeably stiffened up the area

After cleaning up a bit a built a mold to add the needed real estate around the opening

I built the mold out of plywood, using a hot glue gun and drywall screws to hold it together. I used clear packing tape to keep the fiberglass from sticking to the plywood.

This is a view from underneath. Hard to see the plywood around the perimeter attached to the ceiling liner .

Better view here

The way this worked out laying fiberglass in the mold formed another c channel for added strength. After the fiberglass was land I filled all the voids with a mixture of poly resin and cabasol. After sanding the area I added 4 layers of fiberglass to form the deck top

The hatch fits!

Lots of fairing work ahead




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[brantleychuck]

Some finish photos of hatch opening

One more


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[brantleychuck]

I would like to gut this old large auto pilot drive unit and hook it up to what I'm guessing is a motor controller, not sure about that.

As you can see from the picture it has a 12 volt drive motor. I have watched this unit in action and saw it making very small precise movements like I have seen on some CNC controlled gear motors. What I'm shooting for is to end up with two wires that I can hook to a modern auto pilot controller, left, right. I have thought of gutting a tiller pilot to controll it as all I need is compass heading steering.
So how can I control this 12 volt drive? I know very little about Dc motor controllers. My gut tells me I can't just connect 12 volts to this motor via contractors then to some type of AP controller .

I have a few reasons for wanting to try this. This is a large 40 lb drive unit, very heavy duty. It can serve as a back up steering system as the primary AP is a hydraulic drive which of course depends on the hydraulic steering system. This will hook directly to the rudder post via a rack and piñon set up.

Any help to get me started in the right direction would be appreciated. The old circuit boards need to go!!


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[brantleychuck]

Just got back from 2 weeks of boat work. Very tedious getting the port side pilot house and deck sides in primer. Here is one upgrade project I undertook

This is the port side winch for the headsail. I thought all the screws looked cheesy. I removed the screws and ground out some fiberglass

Then applied many fiberglass tapes to attach the fiberglass piece to the hull

Ground the area down to a smooth surface ,then used bonds to finish it off

I'm glad I did it. Looks much better. I think it will be strong enough if I install a bolt or two in aft top area of the fiberglass piece that the winch attaches to.


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[brantleychuck]

This is a photo of the aft port side pilot house
These holes were for old tv, phone location. Newer phone tv locations. The dock side domestic water connection was eliminated also. I never used it on the last boat and I think it's a possible boat sinker if a water line inside the boat blew out while away. With a 200 gallon water tank I'll be ok at the dock for awhile!


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[brantleychuck]

Also shown in the above photo is the engine room vent. There are 4 of these on the pilot house. They have been painted previously. Decided not to waste time on them. New ones are available still. They are plastic chrome. Going to order 4 new ones


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