NEW CANVAS

Hello Friends,

Yes, I am tardy with the "blog" update, Oh well... John arrived at the boat appx 3 weeks prior to me and wasted no time getting the new canvas going. I'm inserting a post John wrote for trawler forum. The verdict was to buy the equipment, materials and have John's brother Mat's help. I had no idea what to expect when he bought a sewing machine. But upon arriving at the marina, I was blown away by the beginning result !!!

New Canvas

Spent over a month on the boat and did a little canvas upgrade. I had a few local canvas shops quote out the job and was not surprised as the prices, 11K to 14 K. the big problem was when they could get to it. Late November and December or later.

So, I decided to do the job myself. I had done canvas work up on Whidbey Island many years ago while in the Navy. It was a great experiance and like riding a bike, you kind of get back into it fairly quickly. I bought a new Sailrite LZ1 from Sailrite and a few attachments, had it shipped to my home here in Las Vegas. Contacted Vaughn Brothers, in Portland to negotiate pricing and headed North to start work on the canvas along with other projects.

Can you see John utilizing Mat's experience?

I made arrangements with the Harbor Master at our marina to use the community patio that is on the docks. Not the best facility to do a major sewing project but a heck of alot better than working in the sun all day, plus they had several large patio tables to make a usable space to work with. The old canvas was tan in color and over 10 years old. It had many repairs over the years. It was also dried up, moldy and pretty worn out.

                                                                                                              I wanted to make some design changes, but had alot of canvas work to do. Picked up the material from my vendor and started the work. 55 yards of Capt Blue Sumbrella, 15 yards of reinforcement material, Snap setter tool, thread and  much more. With the bimini finished, here you can see the difference between the new and old. Big improvement, and all the neighbors thought so too!

Next was the cockpit panel and seat covers. I wanted to finish off the FlyBridge area and the next job was the Dingy Cover.
The previous cover was not very well designed and it needed some improvements. Because the dingy has a stainless arch over the motor I wanted to have a better fitting cover. Also the previous owner liked to attach the winch line to the dingy. This required a long zipper and a hole for the line to enter the cover. The thing leaked pretty bad so I decided to bypass that. Here is how it turned out. This cover took us 3 days and alot of cold refreshing adult beverages.

So now I had to decide. Work on all the small covers or tackle the aft enclosure. I knew I had another couple of weeks to work on this project, by my other projects were not getting done. So I took a few days to work on those, before tackling the aft enclosure. I had some help from my brother who lives just over the bridge in Vancouver. He still works, where as Im retired, so any day that he has off which is only on Mondays he comes down to the boat and drinks my beer. Was he in for a surprise this trip. I put him to work, and we got a pretty good chunk of the layout done. Several beers and a few days later and it was done.

And the finished Aft Enclosure. Also got most of the Cap rails covers done. Back up next month to finish the one remaining cap rail cover, hatch covers, winch covers and Port and Starboard sign covers. Might even have enough material left to make a couple nice bags to put all the covers in for storing.