The boat trailer has been a pain in my ass for quite some time. It always seems that whenever we want to go sailing, something on the trailer doesn’t work, and its usually related to the lights. If you’ve been reading my blog you would know that I completely broke the trailer earlier in the year trying to pull the boat out of the water at Lexington Reservoir. The steel damage has since been fixed, but the remaining work to be done has been to get the trailer sandblasted and painted. Before I left last weekend for the lake, I took all the electrical and wiring off of the trailer, took off any interchangeable parts (such as the hand crank wench) and dropped it off to get painted and sandblasted. Monday morning I went back to pick it up and it now looks like a brand new trailer, painted black, with no rust at all except the wheel bolts. Now the work begins. Over the next three days I spent a total of 16 hours working on the trailer to bring it back up to a working state. The next weekend was my last weekend at the lake and I needed to have the trailer ready to pull the boat out of the water. After I picked up the trailer, I made myself a list of parts that I needed to put everything back together. This included 2 x 8 foot boards, carpet, stainless steel hardware to hold the wood onto the steel frame, new wire for the lights, black spray-paint, new wheel bolts and I’m sure a few more things I’m just not thinking of right now. I first went to Kragen in Los Gatos to pick up some new wheel bolts, some trailer electrical wire, a new connector to connect the lights from the trailer to the car. They didn’t have the bolts I needed or the wire in long enough lengths, so I just picked up the connector. Previously we had a little 4 pin adapter on the trailer, then a converter to connect it to the round 9 pin connector on the car. The adapter I picked up was a screw on connector of the 9 pin variety to directly hook onto the wires on the trailer so I no longer need the adapter. Next I went to Ace Hardware in Los Gatos, just to see if they had the wood boards that I needed. I was instructed to pick up some 8 foot lengths of pressure treated 6” wide boards. These boards are to mount directly to the steel frame and then get covered with carpet to actually hold the boat on the trailer. After Ace didn’t have the type of boards I needed, I went to Home Depot. It took me a little while to find the exact type of boards to get, but I found them, and luckily too, since they only had like 6 boards the length that I needed. At Home Depot I also picked up the carpet that I needed, with some glue to hold it on the boards. I looked for the bolts that I needed, but apparently nobody carries a selection of Stainless Steel hardware (nuts and bolds etc). Next I went to West Marine to look for my stainless steel hardware. They had quite the opposite effect, only carrying stainless steel hardware. I found what I needed and went home to start putting it together.
Cutting and putting this stuff all together took way longer than I expected. I already spent about 5 hours shopping for parts at a variety of places, and now the rest of the day was to be spent putting it all together. I had to counter sink the washer and bolt heads into the boards and mount them on the trailer before I could cover it with carpet. One issue I ran into was one stupid lock-nut that worked too well. I put the holes in the boards first, and hooked up the hardware to make sure it would fit, then I would counter bore the hole for a flat finnish. Well one of the bolts wouldn’t unscrew. First it broke my socket wrench adapter, the one that lets you put a smaller socket on a larger wrench, it just snapped. I found another socket that would fit directly on the wrench, tried to unscrew it, and boom, the bolt snapped in half. Back to West Marine again to buy more hardware. By the end of the evening I successfully connected the wooden boards to the trailer. No carpet, no electrical. The next day I put the first layer of carpet on the boards, and started to work on the electrical. It was a pain to cut the carpet to the right size, but I figured it out after a bit of trying. I ended up using the old carpet as a template for cutting the new. It took longer than expected to staple the carpet on the underside, and stretch it to fit evenly across the whole thing. And I had to do the process twice, as expected the second one was much easier.
Wiring the electrical was a breeze without the boat on the trailer. I had all new wire to use, and I recently already rewired it after the welding work on the trailer was done, so I was quite familiar with the process. After the electrical was done the only thing left to do was connect the riser that holds the front rubber bumper and the winch to pull the boat up onto the trailer. Another issue came up. Since the trailer was painted, I had no idea where exactly, closer to the car or closer to the boat, to mount the thing. Luckily i got it right on the dot, and didn’t have to mess with it at the lake. when all was said and done, it took me about sixteen hours over three days to complete the trailer. This would not have been possible if i was still working full time. I do enjoy my free time now.

Sometimes it is hard to find people to come up to Huntington with me. Not to mention that I usually ask people last minute when people’s plans change and they cant make it. This weekend I planned on meeting Joel and his girlfriend Cory up at the lake on Saturday after they went to the Coldplay concert, and I invited Jenn to come up with me, but she couldn’t get out of work, so my friend Phil came with me. We went up Saturday morning, had an uneventful drive, and went sailing in the afternoon when we got there. Joel and Cory stayed at their friend’s house in Santa Cruz on Friday night and spent they morning with them, so they didn’t make it up to the lake until about dinner time. We had a good night playing some games on the boat and the next day, we had a great sail. It was the first time that any of them had been sailing, and they all had a great time. In the afternoon after we ate lunch at Roy’s Place at the end of the lake, we beached the boat between the two little islands to check out my little sculpture from last week, but it was gone. The rain had destroyed its sand based construction and the rocks fell into the water. It was about 3pm when we left the island to head home. It took about an hour to actually get going and on the road, and as always, there was a bit of slow traffic coming down the hill. Its a windy two lane road for about 70 miles of the trip and it really slows down the travel time. Its a lot of driving for me to go to the lake every weekend, especially at 400 miles per weekend, but being up there is worth it. the weather is nice, though very hot and lots of UV rays for getting a quick sunburn, but even if I couldn’t sail, its worth going up for one night.

On August 12-14th I went to Huntington with Adam Matt and Jeff (not LJ) and for the most part we had a great time. It seems that whenever I get together with adam somewhere new, we always seems to feel the need to build something. Last winter on our snowboarding trip in Truckee we ended up building an igloo, and this trip to huntington, we built a sand castle out of rocks and sand atop a large bolder that was about 6’ tall, standing in about 2 feet of water. One challenge was getting the wet submerged sand dry enough to hold its place and shape before we could use it. At first we were just picking it up, and throwing it on top, but then I went back to the boat to find some large containers to help with the collection, moving and drying of the sand. The castle made it through the night, but it didnt make it through the week. This weekend was also the first weekend I got to use my new PCMCIA EVDO card at the lake, and it worked way beyond my expectations, even with only 1x service. There were 3 powerbooks using the single shared internet connection, and it worked great, no issues, and we even were able to upload a bunch of pictures to flickr from the lake at around 18kb/sec.

Super Happy Dev House III was a blast. I cant say that I really accomplished anything, but I did learn a few cool tricks on my new Mac Mini. I learned that if you hold down the shift key while minimizing a program it will minimize in slow motion down to the dock, and if you kill the dock’s process id while its in motion, it will freeze in its current shape and you can use the window as if it was a normal shape, the window itself has no idea that its size has been altered. For example, you can do this with Firefox, and the browser continues to work properly in the genie shape. Kinda cool if you ask me. I brought my own car this time because I knew that I wouldn’t make it past about 2:30am.