Weather fun. Today morning we had several minutes gust up to 76mi/h on the marina. docks was drugged good 50ft and pushed to the cove wall. Fortunately no boats was docked there.  Walk bridge bent Here is no water any more  between docks and rocks My "paint booth" destroyed. Dock twisted 30 degrees  to horizon   And bonus pictures  

Picture of the day Cabin top no-skid surface finished.    Navigation  Installed IMU on gimbled mount. (small black box)      Deck  Day 147 Cabin top Kiwigrip no-skid applied. Looks good.       Cockpit preparation. Ready to paint. Day 148 Took masking tape off. And put haches and covers on places. Cabin top looks great. Cockpit painting complete. (masking tape keep hatches closed)   An addition to original no-skid template i added pad on the top of transom. It was slippery to get back on the board. End of the day pictures Day 149. Deck sides preparation, sanding (surfacing) and masking taping. A lot of swatting. 28C and 98% humidity early morning and 34C with 80% RH closer to noon. No painting today due to weather conditions.  Deck ready for no-skid application.

Just nice picture  Cover open, glossy parts loos great, going to do no-skid.   Over the week we had couple thunderstorms and  cover has a ripped out in some places. looks like it was too hot for boat to sit under tent and it took blanket out ;-)   Deck Reinstalled companion way wood parts back using butyl tape.  Work at garage Painting hatches Pathched, double primed, sanded and applied first coat of Perfection paint. Deck prep for no-skid   Rolled up tent sides to get some air movement during work on deck. Sanded cabin top no-shid to cut diamond surface peaks (about 50% of height of it). Cleaned all, put masking tape and cut radius corners where needed. Sanded (just made surface) area rught next to masking tape.

 Deck Special thanks to my wife Maria for joining me and help with this last effort on cabin top and deck painting.  First day  Second primer layer sanding. Building frame for "painting tent" for case if dusty wind gets or rain starts. Second day Almost perfect day, about 25C temperature, most day partial cloudy, light wind. Finishing building tent. One  coat of Off-white Interlux Perfection paint. About 1.5 liter of paint used. First full quart mixed as one batch to paint cabin top and toe rails and step outside the cockpit. then mixed ~200 ml for cockpit, then mixed 200ml again.  We found using thick foam roller with firm press to paint and light press for bobbles poping and refinind surface working pretty well IF PAINT is not tinned too much. At temperature 24C I added only  15ml on 1quart (1.5%) of 2333N thinner  and it worked great. Couple pictures Me and cockpit  first coat. Cockpit and me Cockpit itself Big-big tent.   Third day Weathe...

 Deck Sanding second layer of primer. All looks better and better. But nothing to picture, just one more wet sanding (half)day.

 Rudder position sensor Sensor is installed mainly to prevent autopilot mechanism to drive over hard stops. Decided to mount the sensor mechanism to rudder top  bearing cross member (102x40 steel "C" channel). Sensor itself was selected from aliexpress. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806235144088.html For $11 you get 190R position sensor. For this money you have surprisingly well  designed sensor, Sensor made the way the sliding contact is contacting to silver stripes rather resistive material. This sensor must work much longer than just simple potentiometer. However signal will have smaller resolution. This sensor has ~60-80 steps, so accuracy is better than 2 degrees per step. I think it is good enough if i can get better reliability. I added 3-rd wire to make it voltage output sensor, not very hard to do on it. Sensor Bracket I designed to clip on the steel cross member. Ribs on side are to put zip ties to hold it on place. I printed this part on 3d printer, screw...

Autopilot  Finally, connected wires from autopilot drive to Raspberry.  looks it works well and able to turn rudder easy and fast. I did not installed end switches and rudder angle sensor, so no wild play now   Self turning wheel video - Dry test video. Rudder controlled from computer. On Video motor power set to 10% max. Can't wait to install safety switches to try to do full speed run test.  Deck  Still working on deck painting prep work. This day did sand between layers. This time wet sanding. I do not know what went wrong, but PrimeKote  did not self-leveled and as result i have pretty deep brush marks everywhere. and now i need to sand a lot to clean the mess. Second mistake, i wait for a 2 weeks before sanding and primer have got very hard to sand. Couple areas, where I forgot to tip primer and just roller texturing left was way easier to sand, so, likely no tipping any more on primer. After 10 hours of sanding I think i am pretty close to be ready t...