After four long years the major renovation works were finally finished during the summer of 2012. What started as "a quick repair of the deadwood" turned into a full blown renovation including all the primary structures of the yacht from keel up.
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| First works - finishing the joint in the bilge |
The first works were relatively quickly finished. Replacing the deadwood and keel timbers took not much more than originally planned. Unfortunately that was not the end of it. While going through the deck it turned out that there were major spots of rot around the sidestay thru-holes.
Later we found out that also the deck clamps, originally build out of quickly grown spruce, were rotten too. In short that meant the deck had got to go.
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| The deck removed and replacing the frames |
That's when the amount of work started to grow. With the deck removed it was the perfect opportunity to replace the old steamed frames too. With nearly a third of them snapped, not replacing them now would have been the wrong thing to do.
Now, replacing a 122 steamed frames is no small errand. This involved, among other things, the uncovering, removing, replacing and replugging of over 3 000 screws.
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| Replacing planking at the stern |
Once all the frames were replaced, many small things connected to them needed replacing too. Some planks at the stern were soft at spots, a couple of floor timbers were loose and the like. It took another year just to finish all the things turning up.
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| New deck clamps laminated in place |
Before a new deck could be built new deck clamps needed to be installed. In order to attain the same weight-strength ratio of the original structure a laminated deck clamp was the only option.
The tricky thing was that it was mid-winter and to make progress before the spring we needed to make a new deck clamp there and then. Heating a the tent from -20 to +20 centigrade was quite a trick, and a fire-hazard in retrospect, but it could be done with a two-layer tent and industrial heaters. After a sweaty winter weekend we had new deck clamps.
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| New plywood deck in place |
From there started a race to the sea! We made new deck beams from A-class pine and built a new plywood deck to replace the old plywood and teak that had been there when we bought the yacht. We used scarve-joints to connect the plywood sheets and insulated the whole structure with epoxy with no fabric reinforcement. The result was a neat, light-weight deck that really made her look like a racer again.
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| Router for wider grooves mostly below waterline |
After that we impregnated the boat inside and out with linseed oil and thought we'd actually still make it into water that year. Unfortunately not, the planking had dried up over the ten or so years on dry land and no matter how much we tried to wet the boat, the seams needed caulking.
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| Using a skilsaw to make the narrow grooves above waterline |
Now this meant that we had a freshly oiled yacht that needed to be glued, not the optimum alternative. We used a outer and a skilsaw to cut straight grooves along the seams and put it 3-5 mm wedged splines.
To ensure a good glueseam we used acetone to clean the surface and primed the seams with liquid epoxy before inserting the actual spline. Double the work, but no alternatives.
Also the guides for the powertools were nailed to the planking, so after the splining these needed to plugged too.This meant another couple hundred plugs to go with the old ones!
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| Kisen, just minutes before relaunching |
The summer of 2011 we still finished the first coatings of varnish and bottom primer before winter. The winter was used to finish the rigging and trims and during the Spring Kisen got the final layers of varnish and paint.
Finally in June 2012, after four painstakingly long years, she was finally loaded on a truck put to water. The prettiest yacht in the harbour!
