Another of my rather irregular posts but that’s a reflection of the fragmented time I get to work on the boat while still working at a notional 37 1/2 hours a week job in the NHS. The reality is definately slightly on the higher side of 50 hours, with some paid overtime but a lot of the extra being early starts, late finishes and just getting on with the job even in my breaks.
Our holiday this year was booked back when everyone was looking forward to the predicted end of lock down as the prime minister set out his “roadmap” to normality (ie before the delta variant of Covid). Basically everyone and their dog had been buying up caravans, booking or buying camper vans, tents and any sort of rentable accomodation. According to Helen the only caravan park we could manage to book was near Poole so that is where we are taking the caravan for 2 weeks.
She had a hidden agenda with this as it turned into some sort of PR exercise to identify potential sailing clubs, marinas and moorings that I could move the boat to when I retire and we sell the house to move south. That is about the most positive thing she has done so far regarding the boat but hang on a minute – I havent even got the boat back in the water yet and she is trying to get me interested in marinas that will cost almost the value of the boat every year! Well to be truthful there were also some far more realistic options as you get further from the Solent and look at sailing clubs instead of boat hotels with all mod cons. Even the weather in the first week seemed to be on her side.
After the holiday was done we went into another of those house fixing periods with work being done on Matthew’s house (re roofing and trying to finish off the decorating ready for the potential loft conversion), Grace’s house (Decorating, repairs to the shower and the first part of a repair to the bathroom floor).
Towards the end of September I started the planning for repairing the stanchions that are supposed to hold the safety wires around the sides of the decks. The original plastic tops were supposed to have holes through which the top wire went. These had degraded and been replaced on some stanchions by large stainless steel shackles pinned through the 1″ tube that makes up the vertical part. The plan was to replace the missing, damaged and degraded plastic parts with pieces of nylon rod turned down to the right shape. After a reasonable amount of time spent researching plastic turning on the internet I came to the conclusion that people seemed to have reasonable success turning softer plastics with ordinary woodworking tools and lathes designed for turning wood. You just need to be slow and use really sharp tools.
First I found a second hand lathe on ebay and then a reasonably local source of nylon rod. The Lathe is a Draper WTL330 with an electronic speed control system –
That was important because the web posts all said I needed a fairly slow speed because otherwise you can end up over heating and melting the plastic instead of cutting it. As I originally knew nothing about operating a lathe I bought plenty of the rod but I actually only used one of the three 50 cm pieces that I bought.
I started with 28mm diamater nylon 66 rod and an estimated internal diameter for the tubing because I initially had a bit of difficulty removing the steel pins that were holding the remains of the stanchion tops in place and couldnt get a decent measurement. I ended up having to drill out the pins thereby creating 
2mm holes which would eventually house the stainless steel roll pins which fix my creations in place.
Took three cycles of lathe work before I got all four new tops down to a size where they fitted in the tubes with a firm thump from a hammer. Then I drilled the holes through the nylon inserts for the top guard wire and the roll pins. Final step was then to remove the original eyes and brass quick release shackles. These were replaced with stainless steel bottle screws and pelican hooks.
