Progress is more about direction than speed (in St Marys, GA)

(This is what we tell ourselves)

Like the day we spent driving to a machine shop to ask (beg) for help getting three absolutely frozen stainless bolts out of our aluminum radial drive (like a quadrant).

Jon had tried every trick of the trade — heat, lubricant, drilling slowly, using small drill bits, etc — all no bueno.

I suggested nitric acid (“I saw it on YouTube!”) but was politely shut down.

So we rented a car and drove off to the one machine shop who occasionally answers his phone but couldn’t tell us when he might have time to take on our small but annoying project.

I guess we looked sufficiently desperate as in the end he let Jon use the ancient German horizontal milling machine and together they spent THREE HOURS drilling out those dang bolts.

I know it was three hours because I spent that time in the car with Zephyr, watching the clock and telling him “daddy won’t be much longer, I’m sure!” while also trying to convince him he didn’t actually need to poop, did he?

He did. Poops always have the best timing. And machine shops always have the best bathrooms… right? Is that how that goes?

I digress.

The point of this story is that we did indeed get the radial drive drilled out in our 1-day car rental, and so it was a success.

It was also an entire day which is crazy when you think that undoing a few bolts should take like, what, 9 minutes?

But while I usually say that boat projects take 7x longer than expected (if you think it’s an hour project, it’ll be a day; if you think it’s a day project, it’ll be a week!), I recently read a cruiser’s post who holds that you should “double the estimate and go up a unit”.

In other words — 9 minutes becomes 18 hours. Just about right for this project!