Dealing with Cold III

So we wound having an amazingly  F*%*%*^ing irritating and frustrating day today.  You know the kind.  Tools you needed seem to have dropped into a black hole and reemerged in Calcutta, you discover you've mismeasured, miscounted, and misappropriated just about everything, and you woke up in a pissy mood to begin with.  You know those?

We began working on cutting and seaming and reinforcing the edges of the Flex-o-glass to enclose the pilot house.  It was freaking miserable.  No fault of the materials mind you.  It was a combination of poor planning, general irritability, and Waaaaaaaay too much wind to make doing this comfortable.  Still, we persisted and got one of the panels in to figure out how to proceed.

We've used GorillaTape to rim and reinforce the edges of the Flexoglass and then punched snaps through the tape to be able to connect to screw snaps on the boat.

Snaps set into the gorillatape.

Weve used the GorillaTape/snaps trick before to make screening for our hatches, and it's held up really amazingly well.....I mean our freaking 17 pound cat sleeps on top of the screen and it hasn't collapsed so I count that as a success.  Anyway, the actual installation of the tape and snaps on the Flexoglass is really pretty simple.  The Flexoglass is 4mil, surprisingly tough, amazingly clear, and really pretty simple with which to work.  After many trials and tribulations with which I shan't bore you, we managed to position the snaps on one of the correctly cut panels and install it on the screw snaps on the boat.

See it?  No?  That's the Idea.

The above picture shows what we like about it.  The middle panel is glazed.  No, really, it is.  The stuff is damn near invisible.  You can see against the boat's fiberglass surrounding the cockpit the black outline of the glazing panel, and that's about it.

So apart from being in a crappy mood, hating the wind, and not being well enough organized (which is, apparently, my hobby) we actually did get some decent things done.  We now know how to do this, and will hopefully get lots more done tomorrow, and we learned that. . . .well. . . .the stuff will work.

Okay, we didn't actually know that going into this.

So dinner and a bottle of wine is in order.

More tomorrow

M