Repurposed Trailer and The Beginning of the End

For some reason the boat didn’t ‘call’ to me this spring. Of course here in Michigan the weather and temperatures don’t really lend themselves to varnish and epoxy and sanding until May or so. And maybe I was still getting over my primer episode from last summer, but a different project caught my attention.

The boat trailer I had purchased had potential for more utility than just transporting a boat. There was, after all, that ‘finishing off the basement’ project I had started three years ago and never completed. But, in the meantime, the vehicle types in our garage had changed. Transporting sheets of drywall and sound deadening insulation wasn't a possiblity. Perhaps, for less than the cost of one delivery I could transform my trailer into something that would work for small projects that were bigger than my vehicles. I played around with some ideas and finally decided to incorporate the grid concept I had used in making the work platforms from earlier in the boat project and make a platform which could be secured to the trailer with the same four bolts as my customized bunks. Here’s the result -

The entire gridwork is made from 1/4" plywood (with a couple inserts of solid woods blocks to beef up the mounting locations) and everything is glued together. By the way, the second set of ‘cutouts’ allows me to reverse and/or flip the platform if I need fresh mounting locations on the platform.

And here’s a shot of just how useful the platform was -

After this diversion of my construction talents and some initial efforts to get my head around the basement project my wife and I decided I better get back to the boat.

As of this date I have three coats of varnish on the exterior 'bright' surfaces of the boat. In the pictures below you can see that I chose to make the rub strips and skeg bright. I really like the slenderizing visual effect this has on the boat profile.

I also found a method to suspend the ‘loose’ wood parts of the boat so I could varnish all sides at once.

On a different topic, rather than use the generic black block letters from Home Depot or Ace hardware for the registration numbers I wanted to use the same theme I had in mind for the lettering for the name of my boat. Here you can see the solution I came up with.

As I gathered quotes online and from local sign franchises some prices went over $150. Fortunately what you see here only cost $37 from the FastSign franchise. As with most lettering outfits these vinyl letters are mounted on a translucent positioning sheet which allows you to remove the protective layer from the sticky back side of the letters while they remain stuck to the translucent layer. The whole group can then be placed in position. Finally the translucent layer can be peeled off the top.

Next Phase - finish the fillets inside and varnish/sand, varnish/sand, varnish/sand.