02.05.05 - All winter long, the fellahs down at the auto mechanic / boat storage yard -- Allen, Brook, Bud and Rob -- have been delegating one or the other of themselves the apparently unenviable tasks of doing various jobs at various times on various parts of my trailer. Those jobs include but are not limited to removing the remnants of the old and installing the new tongue jack; fixing my aborted attempt to re-wire the trailer's brake, tail and running lights; updating the trailer-to-tow-vehicle's 18th century electrical connections; finding and mounting a matched set of wheels and tires; securing a working master cylinder in order to render the surge brakes functional, and trying to figure out why the trailer is equipped with only one Bearing Buddy.
To date, I have paid them $114, cumulatively, for parts and labor. With the exception of the Bearing Buddy mystery, everything but the surge brakes is done, but I'm hearing good things about a special junkyard down on the south side of Phoenix. When the trailer is fixed, inspected, registered and insured, you see, I can at least move MoonTan II a little closer to home, closer to my garage where I keep all my tools, closer to where I am physically most of the time. I'm beginning to think that paying my storage rent in advance up to April may have been a mistake. Anyway, in the meantime, when not reading my long-awaited copy of "Royce's Sailing Illustrated" if for nothing more than to learn the proper words and phrases needed to describe and define in my own mind the completely foreign concepts that I now find myself thinking about, I've been keeping myself more or less occupied with three "garage" projects, the type that don't require daily (or more frequent) trips down to the boat to measure this or examine that… with only a few exceptions. Remember, it's a 50-mile round-trip just to measure the distance between the upper gudgeon and the top-most point of the cabin, a figure essential to determining the proper height of a stern-mounted mast crutch, which is what I decided I needed to build in order to properly secure the mast at times when it's not stepped... which is pretty much all the time, so far. Since I already had the rudder in the garage, I knew the distance between gudgeons on MoonTan's stern. I had plenty of 2x4 stock on hand, but when I checked and found the price of two new pintles for the mast crutch to be somewhere between $32 and $101, depending on whether I wanted "racing rigid" black anodized aluminum or the more traditional stainless steel (plus whatever exorbitant amount would be added for Shipping & Handling), I decided that a mast crutch was not really a critical piece of sailing gear, therefore neither was the quality of its fittings -- I would find and gladly settle for pintles of the non-anodized, non-stainless variety. With the able assistance of internet search engines, eMail, my telephone and a FAX machine, it only took me two or three days to discover that not only is it quite difficult to find pintles with the exact interior width and pin-length that I needed, but then after finding them, it was virtually unheard of and something approaching heresy to consider requesting them in anything but stainless. Who knew? 
So, standing there in my garage, staring in growing disillusion at my idle workbench,
with MoonTan's rudder propped beside it for easy measuring, it struck me that
the existing Shaefer pintles on the rudder bore a striking resemblance to the male
strap hinges you see every day holding up the gates mounted on galvanized steel chain
link fencing. Taking the measurements of the Shaefer's pin length and diameter with me,
I found the strap hinges for $1.61 each at a hardware store in Payson. The pin length
was about a quarter-inch longer than the Schaefer, but the diameter was identical! Spurred
on by the rush of Yankee Ingenuity and a re-born "Can Do" attitude, I splurged and
bought three of the hinges, figuring I'd use one to experiment on, then I'd fashion
the other two with more precision. I also bought two galvanized carriage bolts, their
accompanying washers and nuts. So, for less than $5 and a trip to town, my mast will now
rest securely high atop the crutch, cradled on either side by some rather luxurious, pink
carpet we had left over from an earlier residential nightmare.
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