Well, I used the beautiful weather here on the Columbia River this weekend to get started on replacing Betty Lou's port lights with the Newfound Metals ports. The 8 4x14 port light were delivered just before Christmas, and are certainly impressive. They will be a massive improvement over the OEM plastic ports.
It took my shipwright Bernie and I all of Saturday to remove the old ports. They were bedded in silicone, and it is really difficult to break them free of the teak veneer without damage to the veneer. All in all, it's a bit disconcerting to see that the cabin sides are so thin, with the veneer just glued to the glass. Where we did delaminate the veneer, we glued and clamped overnight.
Sunday was spent cleaning up the old silicone bedding and enlarging the holes in the cabin sides to fit the new port lights. I used a laminate trimmer with a flush-cut router bit, with the NFM template clamped to the inside. The combo of the NFM template and laminate trimmer made the job pretty easy, but we spent a lot of time figuring out the correct positioning.
Today we are enlarging the drilled holes for the fasteners from 3/8" to 5/8" to accommodate the outside trim ring, compounding the cabin top, and cleaning up the mess inside the boat. Then maybe we can get some actual installation done.
Here's a couple pics from Saturday. Right-coasters, note the sunny warm weather we were enjoying!
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File comment: Bernie the shipwright working on Betty Lou 
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File comment: Old port removed, now we need to make it bigger. 
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