To cover seams and help keep headliner in place, I started adding teak trim.
Adding teak trim to headliner
Bird friends
Hanging out with bird friends this weekend. A couple of finches seem to really like my boat. They are there every morning – as I wake up and open my eyes I see them through the hatch, perched on the shrouds.
A black-crowned Night Heron hangs out with me in the evenings.
Headliner troubles
Came to the boat after a few hot days to find headliner peeling off in many places. The glue I got from Sailrite didn’t hold when temps went up. Will try to a) get a better glue and b) add some thin teak trim to help keep it in place.
Secured head items
Made a few teak blocks with 3″, 4″, and 5″ curves to properly secure head fixtures.
My previous mounting method that used magnets at the bottom of these didn’t pan out. They weren’t secure enough, especially underway. This new approach is much more secure and gets them more out of the way.
BMS is back on!
After all the wiring was done and working last year, I had to disconnect the system to organize wires better and get them away from rotating parts. Of course, once things reconnected, the BMS refused to work properly – not seeing batteries, not turning on the distributor, etc. Tried a lot of troubleshooting with no success.
I took it back to local distributor where they ran some bench tests and confirmed it was working OK. With holidays and travel getting in the way, I finally picked it up and brought back to the boat this weekend.
Plugged it back into the system and it still didn’t power up. It did ask to update firmware, which I promptly took care of. As soon as it booted up with the new firmware, we were back in business – everything working nominally! I did a happy dance. One big TODO for this year can be checked off. Next up – tackling that remaining vibration in the shaft.
🌈
Continuing with headliner
After all the patching and post-sanding cleaning, I finally installed the other half of liner in the saloon:
After that was done, I started on the liner for port-side shelving. That was even more tedious because of all the deck hardware fasteners protruding through liner. Turned out OK.
Steady progress.
More fiberglass sanding & patching
One learning from installing the first few panels of headliner was that it doesn’t cover imperfections as much as I hoped. To make the next panel look smoother I’d have to make the actual fiberglass smoother – remove some of the bumps, etc. As much as I hate sanding fiberglass it still seemed like a worthwhile task so I cleared out the cabin – all the books, cushions, galley items, etc. – and went on with sending off the rough bits and patching anything that looked compromised in any way and had any remote risk of leaking.
Even with the shop vac, the dust was everywhere and cleanup took forever. But I think we’ll see smoother panel in the end.
Quiet night
Starboard side headliner in the saloon
Continued on with headliner install and tackled half of the saloon. Was royal pain to deal with a panel this big on my own. Came up with a system that had a support pole and clamps and ultimately allowed to get the entire panel done. Took quite a bit of time but I’m happy with the result.
