Sunday, August 28, 2016

An interesting weekend of sailing and repair

I've added a topping lift to TLC. That helps a lot for motoring.

It was quiet gusty (for my skill level) when I took TLC out on Friday, so when the little ones arrived later for a spin, I dropped sail, and tied it up with some bungy cord & toggle button sail ties, also newly made, and popped the boom up out of the way with the topping lift. Then we motored out around the lake for a bit.

We made it up to the narrow part of the lake that I'd been sailing towards. The wind fairly funnels down through that gap, on the way back under jib alone I was doing a little over 4 knots through their. We circled a small island, now named "Lonely Island" by the children.

TLC has a road trailer, with a launching trolley on top. There is a roll bar at the back of the road trailer make it easy to pull up the launching trolley. While heading down to the lake, the bracket that held on the roll bar broke off, dropping the boat down about 1", and leaving the roll bar dragging on the road. I managed a jury rig repair to get the boat to the lake and then took the roll bar off completely. Luckily I'd added a winch to the road trolley, or it would have been a lot of fun dragging the trolley up onto the trailer.

When I got home I had to grind off the galvanising and then weld on a new bracket and paint it. All is well but the only metal paint I had is bring red, so it looks like my trailer is splashed in fresh blood!
From looking at the metal where the bracket had been, it looked like there was a bad weld which had been ground off (a very clear grinder gouge) and the new weld on top of that was cold (the weld just broke off, leaving only a couple of marks where it had actually been attached to the main trolley. I'm not impressed with their welding skills. TLC has probably done less than 600 miles on that trolley.

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