The first problem was that the new hatch with cutout dimensions of 507 x 377 mm were slightly larger than the existing Lewmar hatch cutout of 504 x 368 mm. Bruce and agreed that the solution was to use a router on the existing wooden perimeter to accommodate the larger footprint. As luck would have it, I had a visit from Paul, a practicing carpenter, at the exact time when I needed advice. He told me that using a router free-hand was out of the question if we wanted a good result, and his suggestion was to produce a jig or pattern with the required dimensions which would provide a guide and platform for the jig.
To that end I did a surprisingly good job of producing the jig from a sheet of 6mm marine ply, with the dimensions within 2mm of the required cutout. For the radii of from memory 43mm for the corners I found the air filter fitting of one of my masks that was close enough at 45mm.
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| Section of Cabin Ceiling Removed |
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| New Vitus hatch ready next to opening to be routed |
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| Starting jig saw run for the jig |
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| Jig (with dimensions of new hatch) ready for router run. |
I've making the sometimes difficult boarding of Pachuca since 2005 with as far as I can remember no loss of anything overboard, which is amazing given the huge transfers of provisions, tools, materials, etc that I've made over the years. My first failure didn't involve something as inconsequential as a spanner or perhaps a torch, but rather my prized, little used, Made-in-Japan Makita 3600 rpm router. I won't go into the details, but it went into the salt water drink into about 3 meters of salt water. Skipping the details, a dedicated and generous member of the sailing club staff dived into the frigid winter waters and retrieved the router. I soaked the router for the entire day and after keeping it in the boot of my X-Trail for several days was able to completely drench the router inside and out with Inox lubricant, which on top of all of its claims, is non-conductive.
But I could not wait for the slow process of drying out with what I judged a 50-50 chance of recovery and purchased another Made-in-Japan (that is very important to me) Makita 1800 rpm router which was similar to the one that had fallen into the drink.
I had trouble finding a router bit that had a bearing at the top to ride along the edge of the jib with the cutting edges below and would have given up, but Bruce never gives up and working together we managed to find the bit at a place that stated "We don't stock many router bits but the ones we have are over there". It was a small 6.5mm/quarter inch bit and I had to figure out how to use a supplied 1/4 inch collet for the smaller bit.
After the hours of preparation it was Show Time to do the cutting, and Bruce did the router work while I provided the support. The result was outstanding: neat, clean, and generous, and the new Vitus hatch dropped easily into its new home.
We then took a break while I applied 2-pack undercoat and topcoats to the wooden perimeter to host the new hatch.
Sometime during this period I was forced to protect the boat from an expected "10-year" storm event which turned out to be accurate with a piece of 6mm marine ply over the hatch opening.
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| Ready for 10-year storm. |
On Show Day we were forced to accept that the narrow gap between the wooden frame glued in to support the ceiling and the frame to support the hatch was too small to allow the fitting of the nuts to the bolts that we had procured. It was a case of the builders fixing the bolts to hold down the hatch then gluing in the ceiling supports and thereby making it impossible for those who followed to replace the hatch by either temporary removing the ceiling support wood work (a difficult and destructive job) or abandoning the use of bolts and using screws instead, relying on the Sikalflex 291 sealant to do the "heavy lifting" of holding the hatch down against the onslaught of wind and waves. I was OK with that except that the many existing holes in the bed perimeter resulted in the problem of half-holes being presented where we wanted to drill for the new screws.
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| Gap too small for putting nuts on new bolts |
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| Hatch opening routed, painted, and waiting for filling holes |
We decided to fill in all existing holes with "Epiglue" and to that end Bruce used his expertise to mix a batch of Epiglue, thicken it with special thickening material, then load it into a syringe that we purchased for the procedure. He then injected two syringes full of the material into the existing holes while I watched from below and told him that the Epiglue was coming out of the bottom of the holes.
We were then chased off by the advent of another weather front, and the state of play now is that we will meet on Tuesday and finally bed down the new hatch.
The deck photo shows the setup to keep the interior of the boat dry during an expected "10-year" storm that lived up to expectations. The sheet of 6mm marine ply covers the hatch opening, lashed down at each corner, with three containers of water, themselves tied down, on top of the sheet. The measures worked very well and I found the interior to be bone dry when I returned to the boat after the storm.
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| Router soaking in fresh water |
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