We're back, and Grant is taking his first battery of Calvert tests (the Lesson 20 Tests). This gives me a chance to catch up on the blog (hi, everyone! Hope you all had an excellent Thanksgiving!) and post some images into earlier posts that were made from my Kindle (it's not easy to include images using the pda-style format of the Kindle browser).

We got two HUGE boxes with additional solar panels yesterday (the panels are not that large, but there are inner boxes and outer boxes -- the outer protective boxes are large). They look good -- from SunWize Technologies, Kingston, NY. Derek chose them for the price/performance ratio and the size: we only had a specific area left on the top of the hard dodger (bimini), so they had to be long and skinny, rather than square.

Remember the painted teak? Well, stripping it off with Citristrip (use a short-bristle wire brush with the grain, a chisel as a corner scraper; wash it down afterward, let dry, sand lightly) and then using Minwax Polyshades (American Chestnut, two coats with ultra-fine light hand-sanding between coats, tack cloth to remove dust) seems to be the way to go -- it still shows the grain and has the lovely reddish-brown teak look, but there is no visible paint residue. Derek tried this first on the backing teak board for the shower. We are planning on using a SunShower on the aft deck, rather than the head shower, but the board presented a good restoration opportunity. Sorry, I neglected to take a shot of the board "before," as we were not sure this procedure would work. It had white in some of the grain of the board, except in the area where the plumbing was attached, which had been masked off when the board was painted, rather than dissasemble-paint-reassemble. But here is the "after:"


Today Derek framed up the area in the bow of the head to support the holding tank and stripped and scraped and rinsed the shelf in Grant's cabin. It's drying now, and Derek has returned to supervise Grant's next two tests, while I head to the boat. I'm going to vacuum and remove settee cushions and place them in the storage area until we are ready to deal with them. Headliner down next, then woodwork of various kinds, then headliner up, and flooring last. That will be cork, with a few coats of poly.