Ever wish you could repaint your scratched, faded, or worn cove or boot stripes? Have an older boat with a stripe color you don’t like and want to update? New stripes are one of the little improvements that can make a big difference in the personality of your sailboat. You can apply them with vinyl…
Tag: sailboat
How to Secure Your Outboard Motor for Safe Trailering
A frequent question of new sailboat owners is what do with their outboard motor when trailering. Is it best to leave it on the boat or is it better to dismount it and haul it in the boat cockpit or tow vehicle? There are lots of owners in both camps. In this post, I describe…
The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Winch Maintenance
The winches on your sailboat are the workhorses of your rig. They do the heavy lifting and make your job as skipper easier so you can enjoy the ride. They’re also the most expensive hardware aboard so it only makes sense to take good care of them. In this post, I describe how they…
Make Your Own Lifeline Cushions
This is a quick, easy, cheap project if you have any scraps of canvas leftover from earlier canvaswork projects. Lifeline cushions are tubular foam with canvas covers that fit over the lifelines that run along the sides of the cockpit. They’re great as headrests when laying back in the cockpit seats while you check your…
Five Swing Keel Maintenance Blunders and How to Prevent Them
Think swing keel cables rarely break? Think again. Following is a small sample of the confessions of sailboat owners in a certain online forum over the past few years.
How to Make a Mainsail Cover
Summer Dance didn’t have much in the way of canvaswork when we bought her: the original mainsail cover and an old outboard engine cover that also looked pretty ghetto. Besides being 1980’s brown in color, the canvas of the mainsail cover was faded and shredded in places, much of the stitching had disintegrated, and the…
