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January 31 - February 6 Monday morning and soon the Coast Guard arrives. They are down to do some repair work on their equipment and discuss the upcoming conversion from automatic beacon back to Fresnel lens.
Their helicopter is perched in the parking area across from one of the light keeper houses.
Meanwhile we address the door hinge alignment problems. A local, old time, machinist tell me that it is okay to re-thread the 1/2"-12 screws up to 1/2"-13. Since there are 20 screws per hinge there will be plenty of strength to hold the door onto the lantern. Some of the old threads are corroded away and we drill them out and replace the threads with Belzona. Even so, the door still has fitting problems that we will address later when the Lantern is more completely assembled.
We move on to installing the new sheet steel Parapet liners. I am drilling tap size holes into the Parapet castings and then tapping them for new screws. Many of the original screw locations had problems and so Stefan came up with a new screw pattern that will work for all 10 "pinching" strips - all with the same hole spacing. A small detail that most folks will never notice but we feel good about it.
We use clamps along the top of the sheet steel liner and wedge a 2X4 across the bottom to hold the liners in place for drilling and mounting. The bronze base of an air regulator is mounted in place to the liner on the right. The location for the next air regulator, without the bronze base is seen to the left.
With the Parapet liners in place we start installing the cast iron mop boards. Once everything is fitted up we will have to remove them inorder to take out the new Parapet liners for sandblasting and priming. Then re-install them, ready for their finish coat of white paint. The floor and mop boards will be black. This coming Monday the new, custom made, bolts for the window sash should arrive and the lantern should show real progress. We have been waiting for these bolts for a couple of weeks but that gave us time to catch up on details that had to be done sooner or later anyway. High winds and rain hit the coast February 6th and 7th. I hope the temporary shed and it's contents survived okay. We will find out soon enough. |
