Small Boat Voyages

With fine weather window continuing and my leg still healing I’m taking a week off my regular work with the ONS to, well work on repairs and preparations for the coming trip to SDG.

The rain cover will be off for a week at least so that gives me time to put some small tears and worn areas to task.

The first area to patch up was the underside where the canvas hangs over the mast some areas were worn by the metal fittings at the top of the mast causing three holes to appear topside. My fault. I used to drape some padding over the mast before covering with the rain coat. Will definately be getting a new peice of carpet over those parts in future.

As usual the third one is the best. Patch #1 using flexible wood glue. It produced the right amount of ‘grab’ at first but as stitching progressed slowly the glue dried out before I finished. Reglued the edges with another form of glue with ‘instant grab’ and filling capability. A bit messy.

Patch #2 larger and using the IG glue. Bit better. Sticks fast and stays tacky a long time allowing complete stitching process. Stitching a bit frustrating. Using a quick stitcher and having to turn over to get the lock stitch fastened and it’s a lot of canvas to haul.

Patch #3 perfection! IG glue worked well, worked out how to thread the quick stitcher to prevent the needle ending up the wrong side of the stitch, and worked out how to thread the lock stitch blind I.e. without turning the work over. Towards the end getting about 10 stitches to the minute. Not bad!

Remember these patches were on the underside so next job will be the patch thetopsides.

Speeding up the stitching…I found that threading the underside stitch blind was taking up too much time. Here I’ve quickly pushed the needle through five times creating fivd loops which then can be efficiently locked by turning the material over locking five stitches in one go  then pulling tight all the loops from the other side. Tried increasing this to ten but there were problems pulling everything tight afterwards. Five at a time seems to be the optimum number.