It all hinges on some welding

Thursday 30th April 2009

Having travelled to our offices in Slough on Wednesday morning for a couple of meetings, I returned to the boat at Packet Boat Marina in the evening.  On Thursday, the boat was booked in for some welding work at Highline Yachting to repair the hinge on the side hatch door that had sheered off last week.

At around 10:30, I set off from the marina for HLY where I moored on the pontoons between the boat yard and the Waterside pub/restaurant.  I met up with Mark and Paul who telephoned Steve (the welder) who arrived about 10 minutes later.

Although I had brought along some new hinges, with the boat’s insulation being sheet polystyrene, Steve said it would be difficult to weld without removing some of the internal panelling and the insulation.  As the lower part of the hinge was still firmly attached to the boat and only the upper part broken, we agreed that the best course of action was to try and repair the hinge rather than replace it.  This would then only require welding to be done on the door (which does not have insulation).  Steve set about drilling out the hinge rod from both the lower and upper hinge, welded the upper section back on to the door and inserted a new rod to make the hinge as good as new.  Once the door was realigned (with the aid of a universal persuader), the job was complete.

Whilst at HLY, I bought some more coal and propane and returned to the marina.

With a full tank of diesel (160ltr), 3 full bottles of propane (39KG), 20ltr unleaded petrol (for the generator), 950ltr of fresh water and a full wine rack, all I need now is for Bev to arrive and we would be ready to start our journey.

This entry was posted on 30/04/2009 at 05:00 pm and is filed under Cruise - May 2009, Holidays, Voyages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.