Laurent Giles | justflamingo.com

With some offcuts of Ash from the paddle project I thought I’d tackle making handle pads for the Laurent Giles levers. The old ones were long past saving and it seemed like a nice project for a rainy Sunday.

Flamingo has running backstays rather than fixed. The backstays are the galvanised steel cables that provide tension in the rig and some support for the mast. This means that each time you tack or gybe you need to slacken off one side (leeward or down wind) and tension up the other side (windward or up wind) to counter the force of the wind and keep the jib or foresail under the correct tension.

You can see in the photo below, the galvanised steel cable with the eye hooked on to the lever, with the lever handle pointing forward (to the right in the photo) and flat on the deck it will be slack but if you swing it through 180° to the left it tightens up.

First I cut out the rough shape with a jigsaw then sanded with drum and disc sander til I was happy with the fit. Then I ripped the block in half on the circular saw to create the two cheeks or pads. Sticking them together with double sided tape I then marked out for the first stage of shaping. Keeping crisp easily visible lines at this stage really helps get the form nice and even later on so with a drum sander in the lathe I put a chamfer all round.

After chamfering its freehand sculpting on the drum sander to get a nice soft form, with smooth transition between the flats where the rivets will go and the profile of the bronze handle.

I used some copper pop rivets to make sleeves and bronze rod to connect them. Needless to say the rods and the rivets didn’t quite match in size so a little dexterity with pliers and pillar drill was needed to drill out the copper. Once that was done it was simply a case of assembling everything on the handle and then peening over the ends of the bronze rod to clench the copper rivets tightly.

Bronze rod inserted and peened over to finish

I’m quite please with the result, it needs a good soak in linseed oil and turps to protect it but the pair of levers look much better now.

Bronze backstay levers with nice new handles!

All done and ready to fit back on the deck once I complete a couple of other tasks (finish building an extension, fit a bathroom, replace a flat roof, fit a kitchen, install a home office, install some skylights……🧐 )

The weekend started badly, having grown used to not working Fridays it is always a shock to the system on the rare occasions when I do have to go in. My body clock is thrown, as is my colleagues. The day is peppered with….. ” what day is it?” and “but… but… RR is here so it can’t be friday”

Not content with shortening my weekend with work, fate had another treat in store in the shape of a visit to Southampton University with Toby. Though it was a treat to look around such well equipped workshops and studios, and to talk to the staff and students who were equally enthusiastic about the course (Mechanical Engineering) it was still another day out of the weekend, another day not working on the project. However, Sunday dawned bright and dry and I set about finishing off the shelter.

A makeshift handy billy, a kicking strap from a dinghy in a former life, helped tension the triangulating wire as I seem to have lost the fencing pliers and after a lot of wobbly ladder climbing, bruised knuckles and traipsing back and forth to the workshop, why is it that the battery always runs out when you are at the top of the ladder on one leg and just about to get a batten screwed in perfectly? Anyway, finally, I think the shelter is about ready.

Time to carry on with ridding Flamingo of the accumulated junk that is making it hard to see her potential below decks.

The previous owner didn't believe in throwing any piece of wood away.... no matter how small. — The previous owner didn’t believe in throwing any piece of wood away…. no matter how small.

From under the fore cabin bunk I liberated another piece of of mast ironmongery which, like all the rigging is neatly labelled… I sincerely hope the rest of the labeling is clearer than this though…

Huh? If that was the front, shouldn’t this be Port?

In the process of clearing out all the bits of ply and scraps of hardwood I enlisted Tilly’s help to see if some of the more intricately shaped pieces had a home in the locker as they looked like they’d been cut around the frames to make a floor in there. Having exhausted that activity in about five minutes, Tilly declared, “Daddy, when the boat is finished I think I will like it, I don’t like it now though, so I’m going back down to the house. Exit fickle daughter, stage left, or should that be stage Port?

Another discovery, the ‘Highfield’ Levers that tension the backstays turn out to be Laurent Giles Levers….. is this good? I don’t know but it feels good to have a something aboard from this prolific designer. http://www.laurentgilesarchive.com/the-yachts

Finally, two nice solid winch handles were unearthed but popping them in immediately highlighted an issue with the position of the winches. Every pump of the handle would scrape your knuckles across the guard rail wire! Thinking about it maybe the solution is just rotate the winches so they pump port and starboard not fore and aft… plenty of time to think about that.

I can see some sore knuckles resulting from the position of the winches

Lawn mowing took up a large part of the afternoon as apparently, unfair as it may be, all my other chores still have to be done….. it seems the world doesn’t stop turning just because I’m sitting in the cockpit in the afternoon sun dreaming of muddy estuaries and the smell of the sea….

The restoration of a 1930's Gaff Cutter