Between the raindrops this morning (we had about 4 hours without rain), I decided to finally do a small project I’d been procrastinating on for a long time – all summer, in fact.
I did some work on the boat trolley, preliminary to pulling the boat out of the water as is our plan in the next week or so. I replaced a turnbuckle at one end, and added a new turnbuckle at the other. The winch-driven cable that pulls the boat trolley had developed so much slack that I no longer felt safe operating it, because the cable itself had to be held, in gloved hands, when lowering or raising the trolley, to maintain sufficient tension for the winch to work. And that just plain felt unsafe.
The old turnbuckle, that my brother Andrew had helped install a few years ago during one of his visits, had no more room left to take up more slack, so the cable was going to have to be detached regardless. So I detached both ends, installed new, bigger and better turnbuckles, with lots of new slack now. I took out 6 inches of net slack in the cable (though the actual cable was shortened by almost 18 inches, accounting for the length of the new turnbuckle).
Here are before and after pictures.
Before, uphill side (you can see the fully tightened turnbuckle):
Before, downhill side (you can see it utterly lacks a turnbuckle):
After, uphill side (with a new, wide-open turnbuckle):
After, downhill side (with a new, wide-open turnbuckle):
