Side Work..

Since we are awaiting moisture evaporation within the cabin and will be doing so for the next couple of days, I decided to take the opportunity to perform some side work.  I had previously collapsed the mast, removed the jib and main sails from the boat, and taken them over to Pop's house to be cleaned at some point.  I was a bit taken back when I rolled up to find them laying out in the driveway following a fairly extensive scrub down with 1% bleach mixture and warm water.

These sails looked very revived, and I was surprised to see even the main might be salvageable.  In fact, after the wash I noticed that the old cracking and peeling sail letters now detracted from the rest of the sail.  I decided it was time to correct this issue.

After a visit to the local fabric store to obtain a seam ripper, I went to work removing the stitching from both sides.  This was easy but tedious work, and took the better part of a couple of hours to completely remove the stitches.

As you can see, the only remaining parts from most of the sail letters were tiny cracked pieces of what appeared to be plastic.  After removing stitches from each number or letter,  a vacuum cleaner with its hose attachment was required to clean up the mess of black fragments strewn about all over the sail.

Afterwards, I took the sail outside to get a better view of what it will look like with the sail all spread out.

There are still some dark spots in the dacron that will need to be washed and cleaned up.  Hopefully we can get them all consistent in color with the rest of the sail.  If not, then I might be shopping for some stick-on letters.  I guess we will wait and see. 

As always, more to come..