The caulking of the hull is finally nearing completion. We are getting our second wind as we approach the 1/2 mile point. The caulking of the hull was really blazing along at the 1/4 mile point, but not without incident. At one point, there was a delay of a couple of hours to make a new mallet to replace the smoking one. Yes, I was in the groove and laying in the caulk fast and furious on Mahdee’s starboard aft quarter. I was getting an occasional whiff of burning electrical.
John was sanding the rub rail on Mahdee’s port side, so I figured he was pushing his poor heavily tasked sander. John vigorously denied any such tool abuse. Then Brenda who was caulking near the starboard bow, nearly 50 feet away, asked what was burning. I joking said it must be the big floor fan that we had put in Mahdee to keep Ryder from being overcome by Smiths CPES epoxy fumes inside the boat (which was pretty well sealed up to protect the inside from all the sawdust being generated by John’s poor sander).
As you can see, everything on this project is highly interconnected even if not well coordinated. Ryder wasn’t working that day, so Brenda was shocked that that old fan might be on because she didn’t trust it. I told her that I found the fan stopped but turned on the day before, so I unplugged it–with the immediate effect that I could hear all the power tools in the ship yard speed up a notch. That was more than slightly disconcerting, so I also really hoped that it was still unplugged.
Brenda decided to go investigate (so easily called away…any excuse to stop caulking). She let me know that it was still unplugged, but as she spoke, she noticed that the burning electrical smell was really strong where I was working. I jokingly told her that I was caulking so fast my mallet was overheating. She, either missing the joke or deciding to play along, asked me for the mallet. “The mallet is the source of the smell,” she exclaimed.
The mallet was wooden, but built up with phenolic resin. The constant tap-tapping was causing the resin to turn to powder. i decided that if I wanted to avoid an ugly immune reaction to the phenolic resin dust, I either needed to wear a mask while caulking or make another mallet. This was all the motivation I needed (so easily called away…any excuse to stop caulking) to give the old mallet back to John, its rightful owner and start searching the ground around the band saw for a suitable chunk of oak. There was some bronze pipe of just the right size and within two hours, I had the perfect caulking mallet for me.
I have put many hundreds of feet of caulking in with my new mallet and it is holding up great–better than me for sure, but that may not be saying much.
