Bad hair day in Journeyman land

Today has been full of bad news. Leak testing of the deck showed that ALL of the hatches were leaking. In the same spot. Not in the mounting, but through the hatch itself, due to a manufacturing error at the supplier. The leak in the ballast tank pumps that I wrote about yesterday was not fixed. In fact, it was not possible to fix because I had done a bad gluing job. The we started to look at putting the rudders in, and I discovered that the inside of the rudder bearings had been damaged in the sandblasting.

This looked really bad to start with, but Olari did a nice job with wet-sanding it, so the bearing surfaces were saved. When we tried to put the bearings in, however, it didn’t go in. Bad welding deformation. How this will be fixed remains to be seen.

The pump gluing problem was caused by me using only a standard industrial polyurethane glue. We took everything apart and brought out the more professional stuff, and this time the bond was a lot better, so now I feel confident that problem was solved too. Now let’s try to fix those hatches…