Over the threshold........

Newlyweds are supposed to cross this, one carrying the other.

And I suppose in these enlightened times it doesn't really matter who carries who.

Boy carries girl, girl carries boy, boy carries boy, girl carries girl........

It makes no odds.

But never mind all that.

This is Pippin's threshold:

Nice enough, I suppose, but can you see the darkening of the wood on the left?

It's the high traffic area below the cat-flap.

See what I mean?

It's beginning to look a bit tatty.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this in the scrap bin at Emmaus:

A perfect bit of threshold plate in brass.

At least, it would have been perfect if someone hadn't bent it in half.....

Well, this morning, I needed to visit Mackays ironmongers in Cambridge for to purchase one of their finest dust-masks, a flexible backing disc and some 30 grit abrasive discs before I launched phase 2 of The Assault on the Bilge with angle grinders akimbo.

Mackays also have an excellent metal shop. Be it sheet, rod, bar, channel section, ferrous or non, you name it, they've probably got it. So I took along my badly bent bit of threshold plate to see what were the chances.......

Pretty good, as it turned out. They didn't have anything off the shelf like I wanted, but five minutes and just south of twenty quid later, I was the proud owner of two bespoke pieces of custom-made brass threshold plate.

Result!

When I got back to Pippin, I broke out the CT1 adhesive and soon had the single return piece glued in place. The double return bit was more problematic, as the bending of the two edges had left a whisker too little material in the middle. I got it to fit with a bit of judicious bending of the returns using my No. 27 set of Special Pliers. I then socked it into position with the Coarse Adjuster (wooden mallet). 

This didn't work as well as I'd hoped, so I had to resort to drilling a couple of screw holes, counter-sinking them, then selecting a couple of nice brass screws from my bag of 'those'll come in handy one day' items, and duly fixing the threshold down.

Et Voila.

(The slightly off-centre hole toward the middle is for the bolt which secures the hatch)

 All in all, I don't think it looks too bad........

After that, I moved Pippin down to the nearby (and thankfully deserted) GOBA moorings and worked on until about 20:30hrs angle-grinding rust and paint in the bilge. It was filthy, nasty, horrible work. I wore overalls, ear-defenders, a good quality dust mask and safety goggles.

But this is how I looked when all the PPE came off:

I'll happily admit that I'm never normally a particularly pretty sight, but that takes the broken biscuit!

And it took bleedin' ages to clean the bathroom after I had showered off all the grime!

More of this bilge tomorrow..........

:-)