James Silver Western Isles Chance Restoration

  At last I have a transit van to get my work underway again on Chance and get other jobs done around my yard and in the workshop. Not having a transit van with a towbar fitted as been a great royal pain as much of my work needs a transit size van with a towbar on a must if I am to do my work. Especially when I have to move boats and trailers around the yard and up and down the country. This is true of the bits and pieces I have in storage at the yard where Chance is presently stored. The sooner I can get them down at my yard the better so I can work on them. The next big job on Chance is going to be removing the engines and tankage out of the engine bay and getting them back down to my yard to get them sold along with the diesel cooker and any of other items which are in good condition and can be sold on to fund this project. Once the engines and tankage is out the inspection of this area of the boat can be done to see how much work is going to be needed to sort out and take measureme

  Some of the smaller locker doors getting a first sanding down before finer grades of sandpaper is used to get the surface smooth ready for varnishing The larger doors are yet to get started on, the one with the yellow tape is rotten at the bottom and will have to be remade, this will be fun as these doors were custom made for Chance when she was built over seventy years ago.   

 After what appears to be an age I hopefully from Wednesday this coming week I will have a van again although it is not mine it is still a Transit van, so I can get back on the road and get back to Woodplumpton and get on with finishing off the stripping out of the interior of Chance and get last of the furniture out of the main cabin and the aft heads and the wheelhouse roof off the cockpit and get ready to lift the engines out and remove the tanks for inspection and if possible be able to reuse the tanks if they are still in a condition to be used. If they are not then look about for replacement tanks for the boat.  While I have not been able to get to Chance because of my recovery for a emergency operation which meant I had to not work for 6 weeks and that put a hold on doing any work of any kind for that period. So I have now started to strip down the cabin and locker doors and stripped the old varnish off the doors and started to sand down the doors back to their natural colour. I

All these drawers are shot and the only part that is able to be saved are the drawer fronts. As you can see the rest are either got rot or are falling to bits  one of the main cabin drawers which appears to be in good order until you look closer and see that the back part is rotten  One of the other drawers from the galley area a complete mess     

  Just a couple of the pile of doors to do and then it will be the turn of the number of drawers from the boat to look at and in some cases make new drawers as some have so come rot at the backs where they were in contact with the hull planking and were in damp areas of the boat with little or no ventilation to keep the areas from being a breeding ground for wet rot.  Now that much of the interior is removed and air can circulate around the inside of the hull and the fact that the decks are covered with weather proof sheeting the water is being kept out of the inside of the boat and the boat is getting a chance to get dried inside. One job I will have to do first is sort out the contents of the drawers and dis guard any items in the drawers which are just rubbish and keep any items that are going to be reused in the restoration  and source other items if there are items that are more to be needed later on in the restoration of the boat.  One thing that appears to come to mind is the ne

  I have had a busy few days scraping off old varnish off Chance's cupboard doors, lockers doors and her cabin doors. Some of the doors have had little varnish on them since they were first made over seventy years ago. The inside faces of the cupboards and locker doors especially have had very little in the way of varnish over the many years since Chance was build. Whereas the faces of the doors facing into the cabins have had a number of coats of varnish over the years and there is a fair amount of build up of varnish on these surfaces. So doing one side of the cupboard and locker doors as been a straightforward job of just cleaning the surface and then sanding the surface to get back to the original colour of the timber when it was first made into the cupboard and locker doors.  The faces of the cupboard & locker doors into the cabin and the cabin doors have had a larger amount of varnish on the doors has these have been varnished over the years.  The other necessary  job wit