I’m slowly working down my boat sewing project list. I made 5 winch covers for our jib sheet winches, house top winches, and windlass. I used Sailrite’s pattern and instructions as a guide. My takeaway: it is not easy to sew a circle onto a rectangle.
I also replaced our frayed and yucky bimini straps, having to sew a loop and attach the fastener-buckle thingie before installing.
Bring on the next project!
We have been talking about it for quite some time. Today we sprang into action! We replaced an old water heater before it failed and flooded the house.
After two trips to Home Depot (you can never, ever take one trip), draining the old tank, some heavy lifting, and a few choice phrases, we are back in business.
Thanks Sweetie!
First some terminology…
Sailboats have barriers along the perimeter of their decks that are meant to keep people from falling off. We call these barriers lifelines. Lifelines have gates that can be opened to let people walk through them when docked or rafted up. These gates are typically created by putting a piece of hardware that opens and closes on the lifeline at the gate called a pelican hook.
Still with me?
Pelican hooks have a tiny little ring that you pull to open them. It’s usually difficult to grab the little ring just right.
To make it easier, you can put a little fob, or lanyard, on the ring that you can more easily grab and pull the pelican hook to open the gate in the lifeline.
Long story short, today I made a set of these lanyards for Nirvana’s lifeline gates. 2 for port, 2 for starboard.
Installed…
Here’s how I made them if you’re interested.
The easy part is learning how to tie the individual cobra weave knots. So I’ll leave that out and just share one of many links that I looked at to help me figure out the basic cobra knot: here. The hard part was figuring out the best jig or setup to easily secure the cord while tying the cobra knots. I’ll share what I came up with.
What you’ll need:
– 95 paracord (1.75mm wide)
– measuring tape
– knife
– lighter or hot-knife to melt cut ends of the cord
– carabiner with 2 big paper clips attached (the jig I came up with)
– tweezers and/or a crochet hook to pull the working ends of the cord back through and under the cobra weave knots to bury them and finish the lanyard
To make a 3-1/2″ finished lanyard out of 95 paracord, I used 44″ pieces for each lanyard. Cut to length and fold that in half.
Tie a simple overhand loop knot 3 1/2 inches from the midpoint of the piece of cord. This defines the finished length of the lanyard.
The carabiner and paper clips make up my jig for holding the cord while tying the cobra weave knots. Other people use different things; pegboards, wire harnesses, etc. Basically, you want something you can pull against to keep the cord taut while you are tying the cobra weave knots with the two working ends of the cord. This is what worked for me.
The carabiner can easily be clipped onto a drawer handle or hook. The paper clips make it easy to loop the 2 working ends of the cord to start the first cobra weave knot. And they make it easy to slip the finished lanyard off them as well.
Before tying the first cobra weave knot…
After tying 3 to 4 cobra knots…
Keep tying cobra weave knots (9 or 10) until you have about 1 inch of the loop left. Remove lanyard from carabiner and paper clips.
To finish the lanyard, you need to pull the working ends of the cord back under the length of cobra weave knots that you just tied. This will bury them and keep the lanyard from coming untied when it is in use. This is where the tweezers and/or crochet hook come in. I pulled the working ends under about 4 or 5 of the knots.
Then trim and melt the cut ends of the cords; the finished lanyard…
Good luck!
I have been entertaining / vexing myself for the last week or two with a further foray into learning to sew boat-canvas projects. This time, it was two projects for Lori and Trident; a propane canister bag in her Sunbrella color (forest green), and a lee-cloth made out of Phifertex, bordered with Sunbrella. A lee-cloth is a sheet of fabric attached to the open side of a settee in the salon of a sailboat; the purpose of which is to keep a sleeping sailor in her berth, as opposed to flying across the salon during a rough passage.
We could have used one on the crossing from Florida to Texas back in February. On that trip, Joe was thrown from the settee while asleep during his off-watch time and hit his face on the other side of the salon. I’ve never seen nor used one, but Lori and I did a bit of prototyping last time I was down in Kemah and I came home with a sort of pattern. Her settee is about 6 1/2 feet long by 20+ inches deep. We agreed that a 4′ x 4′ finished dimension would work, with a field of Phifertex, bordered by about 3 1/2″ of Sunbrella on front and back. Lori also asked for a run of Sunbrella up the middle, to give it a bit more structure when strung up, and a pocket for phone, glasses, headlamp, etc. It will be anchored on the boards below the settee cushions and secured fore and aft above the cushions, by smallstuff tied to grommets. Lori picked Phifertex because it is an open mesh vinyl fabric, to allow for airflow. I found it to be a great fabric to work with. I’ll be ordering some for my next project – new halyard bags for Nirvana. Stay tuned.
And…. Voila! <<use your imagination to envision this lee-cloth being displayed against the settee of a sailboat, and not the couch in my living room>> The pocket ended up a bit wonky, as I was running out of material, but it’ll work.
If you’re not into sewing or canvaswork, you may want to stop reading now. Because I will document here some of the things I learned working with Sunbrella using my valiant, but limited, Kenmore model 385 sewing machine – for no reason other than I would have loved to have known some of this ahead of time, as opposed to learning by trial and error.
I’ll stop there. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope some of this helps a fellow newbie canvasworker.
I drove down to the coast this week to join Lori and Mike on Trident to work on some boat projects. We sat through a day-long, hands-on class for “Marine Diesel Engine Introduction and Maintenance” which was delivered on-board Trident. I learned a tremendous amount, and now feel like I have a basic understanding of how a diesel engine works, and how some maintenance can be done. At night I dreamt of primary fuel filters, lift pumps, fuel pumps, engine fuel filters, injector pumps, injectors, oil extractors, heat exchangers, impellers, strainers, shut-off valves, stop-cocks, oh, my!
Today, after the lecture part of the class, Lori and Mike performed the following maintenance to Trident: primary fuel filter change, engine fuel filter change, impeller change, oil change, oil filter change, belt tension check, transmission fluid check, heat exchanger coolant check, raw water strainer cleaning). Nine hours of learning and doing. I’m looking forward to opening up Nirvana and seeing if I can identify all the components on her 3 cylinder, 30 HP Yanmar diesel.
Why do they put such big engines in such small places?
The engine and generator are inside this compartment, comically called the engine “room.” There is actually a guy (the teacher) sitting on the generator inside this compartment, pointing to components on the engine behind it.
Lori is changing the primary fuel filter here, reaching through the aft access door to the engine “room.” 
I’ve read about an easy do it yourself way to clean up tarnished sterling silver jewelry. I finally got around to trying it today.
You’ll need:
– a piece of aluminum foil
– bowl
– boiling water, 1-2 cups
– baking soda, 1 Tablespoon per cup of boiling water
– some tarnished silver jewelry to clean
Crumple up the foil really well, place in an empty bowl, and nestle each piece of jewelry into the foil so it is making good contact with the foil. This is really important to ensure the electrochemical reaction required to clean the silver.
Boil the water, add baking soda, stir well and then pour into the bowl with jewelry and foil. The chemical reaction to remove the tarnish from the silver will bubble while it’s happening.
Wait 15 minutes or so. Remove jewelry and rinse well.
Tarnish results from silver reacting with sulfur-laden substances in the air, forming black silver sulfide on the surface of the silver. This technique reverses that reaction, causing the sulfur to instead move to the aluminum in the foil.
Before:
After:
Wasn’t that easy?! 🙂
I made a tool apron for Monte about a year ago. I copied the design of an old, worn one he had. It was a prototype, but has held up nicely. He recently suggested a modified version to better fit the tools he most commonly used – a little bigger pocket on his right hand side. I sewed a new one today.
I cannot sit down at my sewing machine without flashing back to memories of my mom sewing, and teaching me to sew, many years ago. This isn’t a prom dress 🙂 but I enjoyed it as a small project.
Its made out of stiff cotton duck cloth. I edged it on all sides with 1/2″ polyester bias tape; triple topstitched to reinforce. I used 6 feet of 1″ soft cotton twill tape for the tying waistband, which I folded in half and triple stitched for strength. Start by making a trapezoid shape with the duck cloth – 16″ tall, 16″ wide at the top; 20″ wide at the bottom. The trapezoid gets edged on all 4 sides with the bias tape. Fold up the bottom to make a baggy pocket 7″ tall. Stitch the sides. Stitch the pocket divider. Stitch the waist tie on. And voila!
We made a set of cornhole boards for Julie for her birthday. She chose Seahawks’ colors. They turned out nice. GO HAWKS!!
FYI, Glidden paint sells NFL colors at Home Depot. Check it out for your next project.
The backyard is getting quite crowded with bird-thingies. The latest one is a bark butter feeder that I hung up a couple of weeks ago. Bark butter is a spreadable kind of bird food that you can mush onto the bark of a tree, or onto a hanging feeder. You can buy both bark butter and bark butter feeders. But, I decided to try my hand at making both myself. Long story short, the birdies like it! This is a Bewick’s wren snacking on it. I have also seen black crested titmice and woodpeckers try it out.
To make the feeder, I grabbed a couple of pieces of cedar scrap from the shop, drilled shallow holes in each side with a forstner bit. I staggered the holes on each side so they were not directly opposite each other, so that I wouldn’t accidentally drill all the way through the board. Then I glued and nailed a piece of wood on top as an awning. I didn’t measure, but I’d say that my board is about 16″ long and 6″ wide.
There are recipes on the web for bark butter that contain lard and corn meal and peanut butter and bird seed. I simply got some all-natural peanut butter and mixed it with my current bird seed mix (mine is a mix of peanuts and whole sunflower seeds and millet) until it was spreadable. Then I stirred in some cayenne pepper to dissuade the squirrels. I spread some into each of the holes on the feeder and hung it up. Within a week I saw some birds feeding off of it; which made me smile.
Saturday evening, right around 7pm, the predicted “artic blast” arrived with 30 mph winds in our part of Austin, quickly dropping temperatures from the upper 70’s (Farenheit) during the afternoon to an overnight low in the low 20’s in just a few hours. Sunday stayed right at freezing at our place all day, and then temperatures last night again hit the low 20s. Tonight will probably freeze again. Things will warm up a bit before Christmas Day. Then we can put away our woolies until the next cold front comes through.
A few years back we had an outside spigot and pipe freeze, flooding one of our back rooms and making a cold mess when the ice thawed. This year, Monte designed a wooden box to house a 25w incandescent light bulb for each of our exterior spigots to keep them warm and avert disaster this time around. He cut out the pieces. I assembled them, while he wired a light socket and lamp cord for each of them. They worked great! We can put them away later this week, until the next deep freeze heads our way.
A week or so ago, we were at anchor and rafted-up in a cove with another boat when we experienced the largest boat wake we have ever seen on Lake Travis, courtesy of a motorhead who is ignorant of the damage that his wake causes other boats and docks along the lake. We never saw him, but his wake caused our two boats to smash into eachother, resulting in our port-side gate stanchion breaking.
The next day I got on the phone with Catalina Direct and ordered a replacement. That was the easy part. The fun-part remained: figuring out how to access the nuts & bolts below deck to make the repair. Suffice to say that it was not a Catalina 320 design point to make access to the stanchion bolts easy or straightforward. The Catalina 320 owners’ association discussion forum was a helpful resource, with some threads describing the repair. I decided to document our experience, along with some photos, in the event it helps another sailor down the line. This is a two-person job, as screwing and unscrewing the nuts requires one person above deck, and one person below. Oh, and the below deck person needs to be small enough and able to contort his/herself in a very confined space for the duration. This repair took about 4 hours. While this post documents replacement of a port-side gate stanchion, I imagine it would be a similar experience for replacing any other stanchion, but the location will dictate a different set of steps to gain access.
In the photo below (new part on the left, broken part on the right) you can see that the threaded rod of the port-side gate stanchion’s aft leg was broken off at the deck. It’s actually a great design, in my opinion, because even though the stanchion was bent significantly enough inboard to pop the weld on the threaded rod, there are no outboard through-deck bolts to damage the deck by being pulled out when the damage occurs. Another thing worth noting is the width of the “h” on the new stanchion was about an inch less than the old one. You can kind of see that in the photo. But we were able to remedy that by a gentle, but firm, pull on the legs to spread them enough to make the bolt holes line up with those on deck. Don’t forget to order the new nuts/bolts/washers that are recommended in the listing for the stanchion on the Catalina Direct website. They have to be ordered separately. Our old bolts were bent pretty good, and the washers were cupped a bit.
The life lines on our 320 connect forward at the bow pulpit. Easy enough to remove for the repair.
Now for the fun part. On a 320, the bolts for the aft leg of the gate stanchion are located behind the aft galley cabinet. The bolts for the forward leg are behind the middle galley cabinet, where the microwave sits. You’ll want to open both of them up to gain access. I recommend taking the divider wall between the two cabinets out as well to make maneuvering a little easier. There is a molded fiberglass cable chase/run behind the wood trim inside the cabinets. You will need to cut away part of that to access all the bolts. A previous owner of our boat had cut some of it away for some other repair or installation.
When I first opened things up to see what I could see, this is what I saw in the aft cabinet. Some of the fiberglass panel had been cut away already, but not enough for this repair.
I used a Dremel tool to cut away another 4 inches or so. BE CAREFUL to not damage the cabling behind the fiberglass panel! Also, take precautions to not work around live electric cables, to avoid damage/death to yourself. I also recommend eye protection and wearing a mask to protect yourself from breathing in the dust while making the cut. And, beware, that cut fiberglass edge is sharp.
This is an upclose view of the 3 bolts for the aft leg of the gate stanchion. The big one is the broken outboard threaded rod. The 2 inboard ones are the smaller through-deck bolts for the aft leg. I had to lower the cabling that was fastened below deck to get access to the bolts. I found that there was no clearance below the threaded rod to allow me to use a socket of any kind. So I had to use a wrench to turn the nut, little by little. As I did, the top of the broken-off rod rose slowly above the deck, eventually enough to be able to put a vicegrips on it above deck, to keep it from turning as I removed the nut the rest of the way. I also will note that the recommended bolt/nut/washer kit that we ordered contained new stainless bolts for the inboard holes of the aft leg that are about an inch longer than the old ones. That might make using a socket difficult, if you don’t have a deep enough one.
This picture shows all 5 bolts – the 3 of the aft leg, and the 2 of the forward leg. It also shows how nice it is to not have the dividing wall between the cabinets there. It made reaching through with tools easier.
We first removed the inboard bolts of the aft leg. Monte unscrewed the bolt above deck, while I held the nut below.
This is a shot of the deck with all the bolts removed, and the old adhesive scraped away. We used fresh marine adhesive, liberally covering the area of each foot. All that remained was to install with the new hardware.
Voila! repair complete.
When we remodeled our house 5 years ago, we put in a beautiful Kohler Simplice faucet (model number K-647-VS) at the big kitchen sink.
I love it. A few months ago, though, it started leaking water from under the single hot/cold control handle. There was always a puddle around the faucet. It drove me NUTS.
Google showed me that Kohler has really great documentation on how to fix this on their web pages here and even a short video here. And I eventually dug out and read the owner’s manual/guide that came with it – yes… i keep those things 🙂 I read about the Kohler Faucet lifetime warranty. You can read the fine print here, but Kohler basically says: “if the Faucet should leak or drip during normal use, Kohler Co. will, free of charge, mail to the purchaser the cartridge necessary to put the Faucet in good working condition.” Yes, free. I can’t believe anyone does that anymore.
So, I called Kohler’s customer service line (1-800-4KOHLER) and described the problem to a real and knowledgeable person and they said with all likelihood it was a bad valve. They sent me a replacement valve in the mail for free. It arrived over the weekend, and I installed it. VOILA problem solved!
I just wanted to give a shout out to a company that still provides great customer service!
Read on for a few comments on what was a little more difficult than described in my experience of changing the control valve. Good Luck! My DIY photo:
The documentation and video online are pretty much self-explanatory. There were 2 steps that took a bit more effort than I anticipated.
1) It took a significant amount of effort to get the Hot/Cold water control handle off (after removing the set screw) – more than I was capable of, so I enlisted Monte for that job. It took a while, but it did come off with a sustained, firm, upward pull. The problem was the black, plastic sleeve on the valve was stuck in the handle, creating loads of friction. The new valve comes with a replacement black sleeve, so I had to remove the old one using needle nose pliers after the handle came off.
2) the decorative “bonnet” under the handle was hard to unscrew. But, I used one of those rubber, grabber pads that helps unscrew the lids from jars. And with some perseverence, it did the trick. After those two steps, everything else went as advertised.
The replacement kit came with a teeny capsule of grease, which I spread around the new valve’s o-ring. The video doesn’t mention that.
Yay KOHLER!
I’ve been playing with beads again. I’ve gotten it in my head that pendants that can easily slip onto chains would be fun to make and very versatile. Here are a few I’ve recently made.
Made with (L-R): turquoise, tiger’s eye, swarovski crystal, and howlite.
I really don’t intend to re-purpose this blog to be a beading blog, but since it is a photoblog showing various moments from my day…. and since I’ve been thinking about and doing a lot of beading lately..this is what you get. 🙂
This is a pair that I made today, inspired by this pin on pinterest. The noteworthy thing about this pair is that they are my first attempt at making a wrapped loop at the top of the headpin. A little rough, but I’ve got plenty of time to practice.
