What's your project list?

[AlanH]

Everybody has a project list, right?

1.) replace the lens in the forward hatch. I stepped on it a few weeks ago and cracked it and then George went clean though. Today I cut the piece of lexan-epoxy-bonded-to-smoked-acrylic to size and rounded the corners. The lens goes in with black silicon spooge on Saturday (tomorrow).

2.) ditch the *squeeze* backstay adjuster and replace with an 8:1 cascading system. I think I'm gonna use Garhauer anodized aluminum blocks for this. They're heavy but I like 'em and they're beefcake.

Is 8:1 enough? Well, I can easily one-handed pull a 70 pound steady-pressure pull. Easy-peasy-- I mean I pull two-handed 200 pound cable pulls at the gym, 3 x 8 or 3 x 10 all the time. OK, 70 x 8 = 560 pounds. So I can put at least 560 pounds of tension on my backstay with this setup. Seems like enough.

3.) clean the foam backing off the inside of the boat. When I got it, the previous owner had applied ultra-cheap-and-tacky foam backed cloth to the inside of the hull and cabintop. It was a playing ground for mold, so I tore it off within weeks of purchasing the boat, but large trails and blobs of foam remain stuck to the inside, looking butt-ugly. That's gotta go. S-2's glasswork is good enough to just be painted.

4.) autopilot... waiting on Brian to knock out my very own Pelagic

5.) New rudder. The stock rudder from Graham and Schlageter is a monster. It's freaking immense, from rudder head to the very bottom it's almost 7 feet tall. It's *very" balanced, there's a LOT of rudder in front of the axis of rotation and the thing is absurdly thick, like 3 inches. It weighs about 80 pounds. It's also a kick-up job, which is great if you sail in places where the water gets really skinny but not needed here.

This rudder never loads up. I mean, *Never*. It never requires work to turn. We can be totally out of control and spin out and I've got three fingers on the tiller. I figure that there's no S-2 7.9 One Design activity here, so no reason to stick with the stock rudder. The guys in Puget Sound who did a doublehanded Pac Cup in 1998 on one recommended NOT taking the stock rudder to Hawaii. They tried, and busted it in 1996 about 200 miles out. They had Jim Betts build them a custom job. I think I'll go with Phils Foils/Custom Composites. They can make a wood core, 16-inch chord, semi-balanced, semi-elliptical rudder with one layer of carbon, one layer of glass, and NACA 0015 foil for an only slightly shocking price.