Anyway, I got up really early to beat the heat and got started on getting the pulpit installed. It had been sitting in the shed for all these years gathering dust and it needed to be cleaned up a bit. I dusted it off and rubbed it down with NeverDull and was able to get a good amount of the staining off.
Using a continuity meter I checked the running lights on the pulpit and found that the port side was good, but the starboard side was a mess. It was all corroded and the wires were hard and cracked. I guess it was time to replace the wiring, but since the wiring is hidden in the pulpit tubing it became a bit more complicated than I would have liked. Fortunately, it didn't cause me too much trouble to chase the old wiring out with the new. 30 minutes later and I was ready to mount.
I had my son help me bring it up onto the boat and get all the bolt holes tapped and then I laid down a thick bead of SikaFlex 291 on each area of the deck where the pulpit would ultimately rest. Then we fed the new wires from the pulpit into the hole that I had tapped for them and set the pulpit in place. From there it was just a matter of one of us going down into the anchor locker and putting on big 1.5" fender washers and a locking nut and snugging it all down. I didn't use backing plates for either the pulpit or pushpit because the multiple attachment points for the rails make leverage accidents less likely (although not impossible).
Once everything was well tightened I cleaned up the squeeze out and moved onto the pushpit where I did essentially the same thing except there were no wires to replace there. All in all it took about 4 hours to get both bolted on. I took another hour to cut and mount the hawsehole up by the pulpit. I'm now down to 3 cleats and 4 chocks left to mount. I hope to get most of this done this weekend along with the winch bases, engine controls, and always more varnish, but we'll see.
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