Life's a Gamble, so lets take a Chance Restoration Project

Putting out all but a few of the doors and hatches off Chance.  Putting out a spare sheet of plywood which we turned into a varnishing table we were able to lay out as many of the hatches and doors off Chance in one place.  The first of the build up coats of varnish which will take a while to varnish all of them to a number of coats needed to make them ready for the final coats need the end of the restoration project. The main cabin lifting panels with the two doors from the starboard side galley unit behind and above the sink on the starboard side. The starboard side galley unit front which needs a bit of cleaning up to remove the glue and fill in the old sink tap holes. The port side galley top which is going to be reused as there is nothing wrong with it apart from needing a new front and ends trims which need renewing as they are not the correct profile. The two doors which were fitted under the settee in the main cabin. The locker front will have to be rebuild as it was i...

  These updates are of the restoration of Chance our James Silver Western Isles Motorsailer, now that we have Chance at Titchmarsh Marina in Walton on the Naze Essex. Now that it has stopped raining for most of the last few days and the wind has died down as well, It seemed a good time to go round to Titchmarsh marina and check on Chance and see if the cover was still in place and Chance had weathered the last few days okay. Chance appeared to be none the worse for weather and the cover was still in place. I had a good check on the props under the boat to ensure she had not moved in the wind. It would be unlikely that Chance would move as Chance weights even empty as she is the best part of 9 tons and seeing as Chance is behind a high bank and surrounded on most sides by boats and other things she is well protected from most strong winds. Now that the days are getting longer again and hopefully the temperature will start to raise we may well be able to get back on working on Chanc...

These updates are of the restoration of Chance our James Silver Western Isles Motorsailer, now that we have Chance at Titchmarsh Marina in Walton on the Naze Essex. In this video we show what work we have been doing on the doors and hatches which were removed from Chance earlier in her restoration. Now we have room in Simon's workshop to lay them out and varnish them. We are taking the opportunity to do this work while it is not possible to work on Chance down at Titchmarsh Marina. The doors and hatches are getting their first coats of thinned varnish s we build up the layers of Varnish until they are at a stage where they will be ready for fitting and getting their final finishing coats once the rest of the cabinetry is finish and put back in the boat when the hull repairs are finished and the inside of the hull is painted or varnished depending on where in the boat the pieces are fitted.  

The way the galley top was originally fixed to the vertical panels was by screwing the top down into the panels with long screws into the end grain of the tops of the panels. This may well of been okay if you never were going to remove the galley unit at any time. However, the screws which held the top down to the panels were galvanized steel screws which rusted away over time. This made the top come away from the vertical panels. So in order for this not to happen again. We are going to glue and screw blocks to the underside of the top and screw and glue these blocks to the vertical panels so that the whole  of the unit is one unit and not lots of smaller pieces which can fall apart.   The pieces of trim around the worktop appear to now be original as they are misshaped and not to the same standard you expect on a James A Silver build boat. So new trim pieces are going to be made and fitted when the unit is refitted in the boat as part of the galley area rebuild. In this...

Inspecting the wheelhouse hatch, it is in need of a fair bit of work. The front panel needs repairing or replacing depending on how easily is going to be to make a good repair to the panel.  The top as a bit of rot in this corner. As with other parts of the wheelhouse roof, it will need to be replaced as the rest of the wheelhouse which is going to be redesigned as it needs to by removable to refit the engines when it is time to put them back in place. Also it will be helpful toi put the fuel and water tank in while the roof is off. The hatch has a handle on it, however, there was not a handle on the opposite  side of the wheelhouse roof which appears to be a bit of an oversight. However, the covering over the wheelhouse roof at present appears not to be the original and when the plywood is removed it may give us the answers we need to know about what as changed over the years.  The inside of the hatch is different to the rest of the wheelhouse roof in that there is no si...

The two pieces which make up the corner part of the galley unit now screwed back together. The new pieces glued on to the edges which were rotten are a good match to the original as the new pieces are the similar mahogany to the original. The inside face shows the piece let in is not seen from the outside, however, it is a just what was needed to make it possible to screw the two pieces back together. The worktop is now temporarily screwed to the corner pieces in order to see how much of the rest of the unit is missing and how much will have to be re-made to make the completed unit. The original door for the galley unit which is in need of a bit of TLC to repair the split in the centre panel in the door. This is possible cursed by the fact the door panel as dried out and the wood as split. The pieces which are missing are the top and bottom rails from the door opening and the side where the hinges are fixed too.  

The highlighted parts are of the two Western Isles that were build by James A Silver.  One was called Jetta and the other was Chance. The only different between the two vessels was that ~Jetta was 48 feet 6 inches long and was built in 1939.  The second list shows Chance and was listed as 37feet 6 inches long. However, when we have measured her Chance is 40 feet long. So there is a difference in who measured her then and complied the register.  Both Jetta nd Chance have had changes in Name before being called their original names again during their life times. These are photos from the outside of Chance/Token when she was under going a restoration in the past. These are photos of how Chance was before we started to strip her back to a bare hull so that we could get to her hull planking and the frames and ribs so that we could assess the work we needed to do to rebuild her structure.