Windows & Hatches

The following posts are obviously a little late :-) Please attempt the closest thing to time travel available to you, and enjoy the moment!

Here are my long awaited new windows, sealed and not rusty! We are super happy with the job Alliance Glass in Fort Myers did for us, each piece fit perfectly! We still have one more to install when we return in the fall, because a unbroken piece was accidentally broken while being stored for re-installation.

There are 7 hatches all together on the boat. 1 forward, 4 on the salon cabin top, and 2 on the aft deck. All of them needed the steel prepped and the glass replaced. As shown in a previous post, we also installed new hinges on all of them. Here I am doing the very un-natural task of busting the old glass out of the frames.

Drake, watching and waiting for any excuse to use his hammer on this job :-)

Removing the old sealant.

Hmmm... Rusty, difficult to grind and full of glass slivers; Just how I wanted to spend the next few days......

Hmmm... Maybe in the right setting I could sell this as an art form. I have in my travels seen many sculptures that I would not consider a prettier form of art. Each on of these hatch covers did in fact take about 6 to 7 hours after the final coat of paint was applied.

Here are Tamer and Raoul installing the glass in the salon top hatches. Keep in mind that at this point in the day, it had probably peaked at about 98 degrees with a humidity of 90%. Also, most of the time, the daily thunderstorms only made the atmosphere more intolerable.

This is before the razor blade clean up around the edges of the sealant.

Cleaning up.... They turned out so beautifully! I couldn't be more happy with the end result! They are sooooo clear, and crack free too! (Nancy Reagan would be proud)

The new hatches even received a new latching system. The old ones were of a very bad design, hard for the kids to use, and an intrusion into the interior.

You can see here, that the gas struts are attached with a movable stainless steel plate, that rotates freely, depending on how much the hatch is open.

Fully opened... It is not shown, but there is a small rope that cleats to the interior to latch them shut.

Preparing the aft deck and final 2 hatches was a task that we had to finish before Tamer left for Alaska. The last of the big leaks! When we started removing the rust scale from the small space between the outer piece and the inner structural wall, we found that the port side was rusted through in many places. You can see here at the bottom of the picture, that Tamer has already cut off the section with the grinder. I am cleaning up the deck side of the cuts, and prepping the surface for welding on the new piece.

Blayde and Tamer heating and bending the new piece of flat bar to fit the space.

My amazing man welding on the new piece... I must point out (as I probably already have many times), this is the beauty of steel. If you have a bad piece, you cut it out, and weld in a new one!

The starboard side was not near as bad, and I was able to prep like the others. Here I am doing the thing that everyone within 100 feet cannot stand... Air chiseling! It is very affective, but by far the noisiest method to remove scale!

Saaannnddiinnnggg........ Takes me away, to where I'm going...........

Awww, what a cute couple :-)

Here are the deck sides, done and ready for the hatches to be put on. You can also see the skylight hatches on the cabin top, ready to be installed.

WOW! What a difference.....