A Cradle is born.


This is the cradle I built for the PS25. It's made from 2x2 heavy wall (1/4")square tubing. The braces are 1x1 square tubing. Its 6ft wide 12ft long and the uprights are 2ft high and angled in at about 5*. The adjustable parts of the uprights are 1" all thread . Inside the uprights I put sections of grey electrical PVC pipe to protect the threads and make the whole thing less sloppy feeling. The heads are 3/4 ply and 1.5"x 1.5" angle iron 3" long spaced to allow the all thread between. I added a pad of 5/8" foam like you would use for a work out pad to each upright.

I cut all the pieces with my handy dandy portaband, found at the local pawn shop for $40. A real steal concidering they run about $250 new.

I am not much of a welder and it shows in the first few welds but as I worked my way around the job they got better and better.
I used a small 110volt powered Lincoln wire feed welder.
I was never very good with the machine of arcs but the little wire feed welders can make even a hacker like me look good.

Once the frame was finished I filled the open ends with spray in foam to keep the water out. Now if I had just painted the whole damn thing when I had the chance it wouldn't be all brown and rusty looking. I will give it a coat of Rustoleum when I put the boat in the water. The whole thing rides on a 20ft flat bed utility trailer. Not very useful as a launcher but a handy trailer non the less.

Speaking of going in the water.

If I can pull it off I am going to put her in the water this Sunday morning. I've got all the major stuff done and now I think its time for some much deserved SAILING.

I've been getting all the stuff tied down for the trip to the lift all week. I'm pretty excited and more than a bit scared. I hate towing this boat/trailer combo as it is on the edge of being to damn heavy for my truck to pull safely. We will be doing all the highway work(about 40miles) very early on Sunday morning. If everything goes as planned we(Wes in his truck as backup) and me in mine will head out at about 5am, hopefully missing both the early church crowd and the drunks just now getting home.

We will rig her up at the Hillmans shipyard at Dickinson Bayou and lift her off the trailer and set(not DROP) her in the water.

She still has not got a name although there are 3 on the short list. QuaitBayIII, Small Hope, and Short Rib. Short Rib is the name that came to me like a shout in the ear when I was asked her name when I first showed her to Wes. That may be her "pet" name. Her name(Malio) was listed on various bits of paper work but I found no sign of it anywhere on the boat so she will need to have her name painted on her to make it legit. As Malio just didn't resonate with me, something new is in order.
I know all the rules and fears of changing a boats name but as she was so unloved before I think a new name is in order.

Anyway enough for one night.
I'll take lots of pictures of the launch and christening when it finally happens.

Here are a couple of before and after views of the bow sprit. The new one made from a nice clear grain piece of Douglas fir. It started out as a 6ft 4x4 and got whittled down as you see to about 3x3 at the out board end with a power plane. It's about 1.5"x 3.5" round bit for the cranse iron to slide over. On this boat there are 2- 3/16 whisker stays and a heavy bob stay.

I added side decks to the sprit made from 2x6 white oak. They were glued and through bolted with 9/16 stainless all thread. I don't think they will fall apart any time soon. I sealed the entire thing with 6 coats of Glidden Porch and Floor paint. It's a one part polyurethane that I've used for a whole bunch of outdoor jobs and the stuff is about bullet proof.

Oh ya and its CHEAP like me.

Lets face facts,all linear polyurethanes are pretty much the same but the "marine" stores just charge the hell out of you for it. Don't get me wrong it ain't Algrip but you can paint your boats for the rest of your life for the difference in cost. ALL the commercial fishermen I worked with used it on their boats because its tough as nails and its cheap and comes in any colour they make at Home Depot.

I also used the same paint, tinted to my exact colour, on my decks. To get that extra grip I like I layed down 3 coats(allowing a day between to dry) covering the last coat with a heavy layer of Black Diamond Sand blasting media while it was still wet. Once it was completely dry, I blew the loose media off the boat with high pressure air and then painted over the "stuck down" media with 3 coats of the Glidden P&F tinted to "ChampagneSparkle".

This deck will be much to coarse for some people, but I like the extra grip when things get snotty. It is not nice to fall on and will remove skin if you do but you shouldn't slip at all. I wouldn't use it any place you sit, just the walking surfaces.

Geeze who names these colours anyway?

A special Safety Warning.....

Two of my friends have recently given themselves fairly minor puncture wounds. One has developed, what to all appearences, is tetanus and the other got blood poisoning and lost a large chunk of his and and one complete finger and spent about 2 weeks in the hospital.

GET A TETANUS BOOSTER TODAY

If you're like most of us manly man types we don't even wash the cut never mind go to the emergency room.
I may not find all my parts as attractive as they once were but they are MY parts and I'd like to keep them as they are......useable.

Those pictures are from the 1st of March, the day we brought her home.
It was a slow go, nothing above about 55mph, just to make me feel more comfortable hauling a load that was more than just a bit above the rated capacity for my truck.
The boat is 4750lbs. Add the trailer and all the junk on board and its closer to what I might pull with a 1 ton.

We left Kemah at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning to avoid as much traffic as possible and I'm glad we did. The first big truck to go past me at about eighty was enough to let me know I didn't want to be dealing with them and traffic.

We got her to the shop before 8am and after some grinding and scraping up the first part of the driveway, she was home.

Now the serious work begins.

I'll try to post pictures of the jobs as they unfolded. If anyone has any specific questions about a particular job, ask away.

Or at least I will if I can ever break the work/spend, work/spend cycle.

Fair warning, I'm long winded.

I will however, try to keep this light and at least on some level, entertaining.

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I bought my boat last February(06) and I got the deal of a lifetime.

$3000 is an amazing price for a 1978 Pacific Seacraft 25.

She, currently named Malio(soon to be rechristened), was down on her luck, owned by a guy with no clue as to how to maintain a boat.

Her sails were old and trashed.

The teak decks were lifting and in generally bad repair.

Her bowsprit had a large area of rot and was not repairable.

The whisker stays were corroded beyond salvage.

Her trusty Yanmar YSM8R single cylinder 8hp deisel engine was quickly becoming a pile of rust. I spent 45 minutes in the chilly Galveston Bay murk chopping barnicles off the prop with a bayonette so she would move when put in gear. They were somehow the only growth on the boat other than the very bottom of the keel.

The wiring was a scarey mix of 28yo original untinned copper, household single strand copper and stereo speaker wire. None of the circuits but 2 were protected by fuses and I had to hold the solenoid wire on the starter in place with my thumb while starting the engine.

This little ship has been to Hawaii and back to the Pacific Northwest, down the coast to Californicate and somehow ended up here in Texas.

She really deserved a little better treatment.

To get her to the travel lift to load her up for the trip to my shop I had to trust the engine for about a mile. Thankfully the motor, once I got some fresh fuel to it, ran like a champ.

I like to think she was glad to be starting another adventure instead of staying tied to a dock, uncared for and unloved.

Before leaving the dock we lowered the mast using a simple "A" frame and the main sheet block setup from another boat. We had already secured the mast for the short trip when the old harbour master came chuffing down the dock to tell us we couldn't lower the mast while at the dock. I told him he was a bit late but we would be more than happy to put it back up just for him if he wanted.

I don't think he was impressed with my attempt at humour.

The lift from the water to the cradle I built went as smoothly as anything I have ever done. The cradle is a design I was given by a fellow sailor I met on Trailersailor.com. For you small boat sailors that is a very handy place to ask questions or just read about other sailors and their doings.

I have been rebuilding and refurbishing the boat since then.

I've made and installed a new bowsprit, removed all the ruined teak decking, drilled out and filled the some 290+ screw holes and painted and nonskidded the deck using Black Diamond sand blasting media painted down.

The companionway sliding hatch was so badly rotted at one corner that it was unrepairable so I built a new one using oak frames, 3 layers of epoxy and bent 1/4"plywood and 3 layers of epoxied glass cloth.

I have found the best cheap paint for use as deck paint is available at Home Depot. Its called Glidden Porch and Floor paint. It can be tinted any colour you like and is about $20 a gallon, a very far cry from the insane amount of money wanted by some of the "marine" stores for a polyurethane paint that is, for all intents and purposes, the same paint.

When it comes to wiring, unfortunately, you don't have any choice. You simply have to use the best. Well you CAN go with cheap automotive store wire but you'll be redoing it in about a year or so. By the best I mean real "marine grade" wire.
The damn stuff is expensive but it will last and as it has more strands it will bend more easily around the strange shapes found on a boat. You MUST also use proper "marine grade" terminals. You can use crimped(my choice) or soldered connections. Both the wire and terminals can be found on Ebay from a store called "genuinedealz" at fair prices and in sizes and multi wire cables you just don't often find at your local West Marine type shop.

I bought a BlueSea breaker panel with about a dozen circuits, an ammeter, and a voltmeter.
Way too expensive but a really well made piece of work.
I bought an Ancor ratchetting double crimp tool, also insanely expensive, but it really does make the best crimp joints. I've never had one pull loose, they are better looking and seem to seal better than single crimp type joints.

I put in 2 large deepcycle batteries for the nonengine circuits and a group 27 starting battery to get the little Yanmar rattling.

I rebuilt all the running lights as they were mostly corroded and in general poor condition. The biggest pain was running the wires up the mast for the mast top lights and running them through the deck. The old deck fittings were trashed so they to got replaced. While I was running things up the mast I also ran the VHF antenna cable. It made for a bit of a wrestling match with wires being fished through small channels in a mast some 25ft long. A job most easily done while the mast was down, which it was.

One of the things that so many sailors seem to fear is a decent stove.
Or at least one that uses a fuel that burns hot enough to boil water in less than a week.
They also seem to think it must be smelly, sooty, and generally unpleasant to use. It must flareup and burn off your eyebrows at least once a trip and leak into your granola when its the last thing you have thats edible after an unexpextedly long passage. A curse on pressurized kerosene and alcohol stoves.

They have such a fear of propane that it has been raised to mythically explosive proportions.
Don't get me wrong it could blow your boat to bits if you screw up, but the damn stuff stinks to high heaven(its made that way you know). If you smell it, don't make any sparks. You vacate the area and turn off the gas at the bottle and air out the cabin and bilge. If you use your brain for more than holding apart your ears you should never ever have a problem with a propane appliance on your boat.

I built in a DickinsonMarine 2 burner propane stove. It is a beautiful stainless steel work of art. It starts using a piezo system and will shut the valve if the wind blows out the flame. It cooks quickly and is easy to keep clean.
The people at the factory(dickinsonmarine.com) are very nice to deal with if you need any help.
It may be the nicest thing other than the new sails I've done to the boat and my eyebrows are now able to get that old salty seadog sailor look. So apparently are my ears but thats another story.

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Lest any of you daft enough to have read this far think I'm some rich guy rebuilding a toy let me assure you nothing could be further from the truth.

I'm just a working stiff like most of you.
I am my own boss and I have my own little business catering to the law enforcement, hunting and sport shooting crowd around Houston Texas. I'm a gunsmith by trade and a good one by most accounts. I'm sure there are a few who would disagree, but lets face it I can delete their comments so you only have my word.

I do mostly repairs and restorations and avoid most of the custom work favoured by those guys with the fancy guns and big camo 4x4s.
I CAN do most of the stuff they want but I don't enjoy it so I don't do it.

I don't enjoy being a gunsmith as much as I used to but thats mostly because it gets in the way of my leisure time. I would prefer to goof off and go sailing.
I suppose it also pays for all the sailing stuff so maybe I should get happy with it again.....soon. The cost of the rebuild is a bit higher than I would have hoped. It always is. There's no such thing as a free dog or a free boat.

I would have mentioned free women but after 23yrs with the same one I know better.

Please don't ask me questions about guns. I can't fix them over the internet and I mostly forget everything I've ever learned about the business when I'm outside the shop environment.

You can't tell me any tall tales because when you get to the "you ain't gonna believe this shit" part, you're right I won't. I won't call you on it, but I'll always look at you funny afterwards.
I have a sign in my shop that asks that
"All "FACTS" in hunting stories be kept within the realm of possibility".

The only liars worse than fishermen are hunters.

Sailors of course never lie or stretch the truth with the exception of weather stories.
I have heard stories of weather so severe that NOAA has been afraid to post them on their official web site.

I have actually been involved in some of these happenings and have been so traumatized that my recollection of the event was somewhat different than those of the story teller.

How I can confuse 9 feet of icy green water coming over the deck like a freight train with the lumpy splashes that got down the front of my fouly bibs can only be reasonably put down to the temperature of the water freezing the memory portion of my brain.......but I digress.

As a commercial fisherman working off the west coast of Canada I got to see(and work in) just about all the weather of the snotty sort one could ever wish for.

We also has some of the most fun you can have while earning a living.

I'm sure a day of that sort now would probably, if not kill me, at least put me on the couch for 3 days.

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