Miscellaneous stuff you can't do without

[mike cunningham]

Well, there is a downside to sitting around the house during lockdown and that downside is thinking up things to post on the Freedom board.

So I wanted to list things I keep on board that really come in handy

1. pocket rubber (tape) goofy name but extremely useful self amalgamating vinyl tape. If you call or e-mail them you can get only white color on your order. I have used this stuff for all sorts of things from rigging wrap to wrapping the bottom of my coffee cup so I don't scratch the varnish.

2. Bamboo BBQ skewer sticks - You can get a package of 100 for a dollar or two. I use them for everything from filling up screw holes to stirring my coffee to stirring paint and on and on. These are the cheapest most useful things ever. Get the ones that are about a foot long. You can cut them with dikes and make them any size you want.

3. popsicle sticks - almost as good as BBQ skewers, all kinds of uses, shims, stirrers. epoxy application and filleting etc.

4. A set of plastic automobile interior disassembly tools (really) - these are the things auto body guys use to get all those plastic connectors out of the interior panels in your car when they need to get at the guts of the car. They are available as a kit of four or five tools on Amazon fairly cheap. Oh man are these things useful for prying stuff up (like silicone stuck portlight frames) without damaging gelcoat. I used them to help with adjusting the headliner I just installed too.

5. "bed-it" butyl tape from Pbase (online) - outstanding stuff for bedding hardware and apropos of #4 for bedding your portlights. The beauty of this stuff is getting things back apart for future replacement is not an exercise of self torture like silicone or 5200 sealing is. The butyl comes right off with some mineral spirit. It does need compression though. I tried it to seal my mast to mast ring gap and it failed miserably, you need the two pieces to mush together so the butyl can make a seal. Added benefit is it sticky so you can take a BBQ skewer, put a little bit of butyl on the end and recover that screw or nut or wire you dropped into that deep crack or lost behind a panel. I have a lot of experience with this one.

6. Talenti Gelato jars large and small sizes - Fantastic containers for all kind of junk and food aboard. I have my spare injectors stored in one and coffee, rice, sugar, stored in others. What I like is you get some free gelato along with the container purchase.

7. Amazon rechargeable AA and AAA batteries + 12 Volt charger case - I was sick and tired of always running out of batteries for my stuff. now I can recharge dead ones using the 12 Volt charger plugged into a lighter socket.

8. USB sockets and USB rechargeable lights - There are a lot of options on Amazon. The new rechargeable lights are long past gimmick stage and are ready for primetime IMO. Excellent light, superb battery life and no wiring. I have replaced some of my permanent 12VDC lighting with these, they are that good.

9. Plastic "chislers" (Amazon) - these are small sharp edge but plastic scrapers which fit nicely in your hand and are great for getting old adhesive or whatever off surfaces which you do not want to scratch, like gelcoat or lexan. They are cheap and very effective as scrapers. I am absolutely sure they will come in handy for other stuff too. They would make excellent epoxy filleting tools because they have nice radiused corners.

[Tmack]

This is timely. Can you, or someone else, provide more information (links!) on #5? I pulled 2 port windows yesterday and I see that they could all use replacement.

Thanks.

[mike cunningham]

Tom, here's the link to Pbase bed-it byutl - and obviously, I don't know how to spell butyl. Well, now I do.

As an added bonus, The guy's website has a lot of interesting boat project details too.

https://pbase.com/mainecruising/butyl_tape

edit: he has changed his website since I last visited. The tape link above is still good but all the projects (and the tape) are now at

https://marinehowto.com/

[SFBaysailor]

0E6FB340-E986-4882-90DC-B25083E7563E.jpeg (104.22 KiB) Viewed 2313 times

+1 on the butyl. Three rolls so far as I complete my many-month port replacement. My tip: Store it in a ziploc in the fridge and bring it to the boat in a cooler with a cold pack. It’s gets hard to work with when it’s warm.

I notice I get additional turns on the mounting screws for my ports almost every time I go to the boat. Stuff definitely works it’s way in. Not a speck of leakage.

RE The boat: Not pretty, I know. But she’s getting there (very) slowly. Now that things are water tight I can do more cleaning. Teak rails arriving next week!