⛵Holes! Holes! HOLES! 😱 Restoring a 40 year old steel yacht!! [S2-EP36]

I'm Andy, I'm Melissa and I'm Jack and together we're working on restoring our sailing yacht. Some of you might think we're crazy taking on the challenge of restoring this boat and creating a life less ordinary and we're sure there will be blood sweat and tears but it'll all be worth it when we embark on our epic adventure around the world. Hi everybody. Right, Jack and I are at the boat today and we are going to continue work which we started some time ago but we're going to carry on with work on the coach roof. I've spent far too long this morning sitting on the new cockpit seats drinking tea but now it's time to get some work done. Right, unfortunately the wind which was not meant to be today has stopped play out on here. I can't do anything, treat any of the rust and grind any of that away because obviously I don't want it to go on the other boats so unfortunately I'm gonna have to do a different job. So what am I doing now? I am currently just cleaning all the dust off the pilot house roof. Hopefully later on I'll be able to get another coat of paint on this. While the wind's a bit high I thought I'd give this a quick clean. Oh now it's raining and where the weather's pants I'm just gonna do some tea coiling and just have a relaxing Sunday I think. Right, we have decided to declare today a rest day haven't we? We have, well I have, Jack has stayed in his pyjamas most of the day. I've cleaned the, cleaned the, I got all my tools out then it got windy. It stopped raining the weather forecast said it wasn't going to be raining. I know, so then I cleaned the pilot house roof ready to paint again and then it started raining so then I went inside thought about starting the bilges. You did some tea coiling. But I didn't do that so I ended up doing some tea coiling and just chilling with Jack listening to an audiobook. So we're gonna go and drive. What audiobook was it? Sailing Pirate Waters. Yeah so we're gonna get off the island and see if the weather's better on the other side and if it is possibly. We are on the Isle of Anglesey. Yeah. We're gonna get off the island and see what weather's like on the other side and if it's if it's nice then we might go and explore somewhere. So next job on the list is to sort out these holes in the pilot house where the old instruments were. So we've got, there was a speaker here and sort of wind and depth instruments here. We're not going to be putting those because we're going to be putting the instruments on a pod in the cockpit so I'm going to start start working on some patches to fill some of these holes up. What I'm doing at the moment is cleaning up around this hole that I'm going to cut out and I'm cleaning up using this terracotta thing that I've talked about before so I can see how far back I need to cut. So at the minute it's looking like about here and about here and to get out all of that nasty steel and just put it back in and one of the things that is always a struggle is to think oh I'll just do this little bit along here and I'll just go up here and I'll just go along there. It's so easy to just kind of keep going and keep going and keep going and my priority today is get a piece of metal welded into that hole and if I spend an hour cleaning up the hole of this with this terracotta I'm not going to have time to put a piece of metal in that hole and we're going to be back to square one so I'm sort of desperately trying to be restrained and self-controlled and just clean up this bit and weld this bit in before I move on to that bit or that bit or even start looking at that bit. That actually won't be too bad but it's really really hard for me to just be self-controlled and stick to the job and just do this little bit here but that's where Melissa's a lot more focused than I am. Right I've come to a conclusion I know what this is like it's like practicing scales so for years and years before I became a paramedic I was a musician I was a guitarist and for a long time I spent ages working on technique and just practicing 16th note triplets and practicing arpeggios and what I had to do to get those good was just sit for hours and hours and hours monotonously focusing intently on the same thing again and again and again until it was right so that's the kind of philosophy that I'm going to try and adopt here because I can do it and I have done it but you know the creative side of me wants to keep going and go off onto tangents but the technical side of me has to stay focused and get this done. I made that coffee and never drunk it so I've decided before I weld this disc thing on I'll have a coffee and play some guitar and now I can just draw around that cut out a fresh piece of steel and weld it in try doing that in fiberglass. Going over this with the flap disc it doesn't actually create a great surface for painting on and it does get rid of all the specks of rust in the surface so that's just for welding it in before I paint it finally I'll probably put some red oxide on to protect it before it gets its final coat I will be going over it with the terracoo which of course is the correct surface prep because it's a blaster it's a rotary blaster not a sandblaster but that surface will be prepped properly before it gets the epoxy on it. I'm letting this cool down a little bit between runs because I don't want to build up too much heat in the panel and crack this piece of glass. I'm no good at vertical welds there's far too much wire in that there's not enough heat in it so it's not brilliant once it's ground flat it'll be fine but I'm rubbish at vertical welds. That one's better you see but that's going downwards proper welders go up. Well that panel's in gonna let that cool down and then tackle this one and that one and crack on with the job. Yeah it's all sealed and watertight and it'll be fine once it's ground down I'm just not very good at welding vertical lines. The angle grinder and these thin cutting discs are amazing for cutting through steel they really do go through it very quickly they're really good and we've been gifted loads of these by people on our amazon wish list which we just can't thank you enough. We've had so much stuff for flap discs and cutting discs and everything else we're really really appreciative because we go through these like you wouldn't believe but as you know we're sponsored by Lincoln who've given us the MIG welder and they've also given us this amazing plasma cutter which we've been using a lot you've probably seen it in various episodes. Now where that's going to be fantastically handy is this job now as you've I've done that one which is all straight edges I've now got to do this one which is a round hole now I've drawn on the back using this welder's pencil so I can cut that out but doing that with an angle grinder would be you could do it you could snip snip like 50 pence piece it if you're English or I don't know what American coins I've got plot sides somebody tell me but you could go around it in plot sides and then clean it all up and make it fit and it would work and if we had to that's what we'd do but it's going to be much easier to cut around this with the plasma cutter because I can just go around freehand in a reasonably accurate line what's really cool is that this plasma cutter that we've been given you don't need an external compressor you can put an external compressor on if you want to but you don't need one it's got a built-in compressor so I don't have to go firing up the big petrol compressor down down below so let's get this cut hey and you do need gloves for that because that is pretty flipping hot clean up again remember I'm going to put some red oxide on this once I've painted it in but before it gets the epoxy it will get the treatment with the terracotta so it's surface prepped properly and it's got all of the rust removed from it just on that note something I've mentioned in episodes before when you buy brand new steel it comes with mill scale on it which is a kind of black surface that surface is absolutely no good for for welding it's no good for for painting and you have to get it off somehow now the the preferred method for getting it of course of course is sandblasting and you sandblast it till it's a particular grade I won't go into that and I've been reading up a little bit about it but I'm no expert on it but you sand it up to a particular grade of grit using a sandblaster and it gets all the mill scale off and it preps the surface of the steel and that's all lovely now as you know we can't sandblast in this yard so a lot of advice that we've had from a lot of other metal boat owners and steel fabricators and yacht engineers is leave it out in the rain leave it out just to brown off to get a little bit of a brown surface which as you've noticed a lot of our steel does just leave it outside and that blows all the mill scale off then you can clean it up with the flat disc weld it in and then surface prep it using spot blasting or using the the terracoo rotary blaster or whatever so that's the method we're doing so if you're puzzling over why why are we using rusty metal we're not we're using brand new steel that we've bought that's been left outside just to brown off to get rid of the mill scale tell me if you think that that's a horrific way to do it but that's the advice we've had from lots and lots and lots of of engineers and boat builders and as many people as you ask about these things you'll get a different opinion ask 50 people you'll get 50 opinions so but that seems to be a fairly consistent advice from quite a lot of people including the guys that that work in the yard here so there you go tell us if you think it's horrendously wrong though that's welded in that's welded in i've ground this one flat i don't want to spend too much time grinding today because i want to get as much welding done as i can because we can grind them finish the welds off another time but that's okay that's okay um let's have a look at that's the back side of that weld so i've wound i've welded around the inside as well and there's welded around the inside of that so even though they might not be as pretty as if somebody else had done them uh they're fine there's no they're strong and they're not going to leak um and let's face it if this is the coach roof what's the worst that can possibly happen if there's a pinhole in the worst that can possibly happen is um possibly it rusts again in a few years the boat's not going to sink the boat's not going to fall apart it's not dangerous it might just be at worst inconvenient but certainly not dangerous so um and to be honest i don't think it will i think it'll be fine patches are in one two three four and five and you're probably thinking to yourself why have you left all those rust patches why don't you deal with those and paint them i don't have time today i've done the patches they're welded in next time i can clean all of this up and treat it properly what i've got to do of course is get some red oxide on that paint to protect it until next time and then it'll be a case of grinding back those welds and going over but for now it's just a case of cleaning them up and painting them i've got one more patch i want to try and do before i go i'll see if i've got time i was going to do another patch um there's a patch in the transom i want to do that patch there and it kind of goes across the side of the seat it's where i took out um some really bad steel from the transom now i'm not talking about the long one that's the uh that's going to be the deck drain but the patch halfway up the transom now i'm not going to do that because this jotun paint is pretty flammable and it does tend to kind of smolder and puff up a little bit and i can fire watch the outside from either side of the transom while i'm welding it myself but i'm here on my own and what i really need for this one is somebody in the back lazarette just with a damp cloth in case that does go up so i'm just going to be sensible and do that next time uh so for now i'm just going to uh clean up tidy up and get some red oxide on these patches um yeah quite pleased with today good progress doesn't seem like a lot to you probably just a load of little patches in a boat but trust me that's a lot of work for a day um you're probably sitting there thinking flipping it this is taking a long time why doesn't he get on with this job um that's how long it takes guys so there we are at the end of another day um i've put four five patches in um and uh prepped them and painted them that's pretty much it really um just to kind of show you the the difference this one here i've cleaned back with the grinder there's a tiny little pinhole there i've cleaned it back with the grinder um and just kept feeding in some more welding wire clean it back a bit more filled in some more welding wire and that's now pretty good uh it needs just cleaning up um skim with some epoxy filler and i've actually got some really nice stuff from west system which we'll use to skim just to lightly skim that to take out any imperfections these ones yet i haven't ground the welds back so you can see the difference between weld not ground back and weld ground back and it also enables me then to identify any tiny little pinholes and we've also got the weld penetration kits that you spray on as well which which does the same thing so again this one's not being ground back um and neither have these two um and i've the only places i've put the red oxide paint are the places where i've actually done you know removed paint and exposed metal so we're starting to get quite a lot of red oxide on this boat but every time i do any work and every time i remove paint back to their metal i'm just now putting some red oxide on just to protect it even though this will probably get blasted off and replaced with the two pack epoxy system but i don't want to be wasting that two pack epoxy system until we're ready for it and then we can clean up the whole cockpit in one go and when all the welding and all the fabricating all the cutting and grinding and the really nasty stuff is done then we can then we can prep and paint the entire thing but it won't take very much to to lift that off and i think actually with the spec sheet i think you can paint over this red oxide anyway but if you can't i'll just take it off it's not a problem that's all tidied up um i've got to put the jet washer away just suddenly forgot that and uh having put everything away the paint brushes the paint blah blah blah blah i've forgotten to paint that patch i have welded the patch in but i've forgotten to paint it i'm not getting everything else out again now that can deal with that next time but i have had a clever one of the things that we've been wondering about is the gas locker now as you may recall and if you don't recall go back and watch many episodes before where the gas locker used to be here and it was in a stupid place and it was full of water and it was just daft so how about this that gas locker sit that gas bottle sits quite nicely there we can actually sit a pair side by side here bear with me and then take a seat which i was going to just take straight across in a curve over the two gas bottles so that it's a more comfy curve to sit on when you're at a high angle of heel or when the boat's heeling over you've got a curved seat here but the gas bottles are effectively out in the cockpit safe they will drain straight overboard just straight out the scuppers at the cockpit here the cockpit drains there's no risk of gas getting into the boat and and they'll be hidden underneath this seat which this sort of arched curved seat i think that's a good idea tell me in the comments if you think it's a stupid idea but it actually it gives the right height to sit on here at the top half plenty of room to stand behind the wheel so i think this is a a really nice idea to basically have the gas bottles out in the cockpit loads of people just have them out on the back of the boat tied to the push pit rail anyway because it's safer but it doesn't look very pretty does it but having the gas bottles out here in the cockpit under that hidden seat i think that's a marvelous idea tell me what you think obviously with this project we're going through an awful lot of steel and we got it from Mona F&T in Anglesey link in the description so if you need to get any steel anywhere in Wales i think they ship across the entire country great guys to work with and if you wanted to some people feel like they want to contribute to this project we don't ask anybody to we don't expect anybody to and anybody that does is just a legend but if you did want to you could ring them up and put something on account and then that would help fund the steel for the project and similarly with the gas we're using this argon heavy argon mix from Hobby Weld and we get it from Weld Gas Cymru, Weld Gas Wales and i'll put a link in the description to them as well because they're the two things that we're using most of now grinding discs or cutting discs flap discs we've got loads of we're always going to need more steel and welding gas so we're running through that at a rate of knots but that's the way it is so part of the reason as well the project takes a little bit longer to kind of gain momentum is we have to wait each month until we get paid to go and buy more steel and more gas and that's just the way it is that's life but i just thought i'd put a link in the description to those two guys who are fantastic and supporting us with the gas and the steel and now i'm all ready to go taking this gas to go and get changed i've got my son's graduation this friday i'm immensely proud my son steven got a first in maths but his graduation ceremony was delayed by a year because of the dreaded covid but on friday i'm going to see my son graduate and i'm just so so proud of him love you but love you mate you're just my hero but unfortunately it means i'm missing melissa's birthday which is on friday on the same day so i'm dashing down to chichester to the to portsmouth rather to my son's graduation on friday and then dashing back as quickly as i can afterwards and we're gonna have a bit of a barbecue here on saturday for melissa's birthday i think so remember to wish melissa a happy birthday in the comments everybody um off to get gas now