Cat under a cold tin roof

Last night, a weather system rolled in off the pacific north west coast packing 85 mile per hour winds. Good thing I wasn't out there doing a little off shore sailing. However, I awoke to find 16+ inches of snow on top of the shop roof and bony chills ran up my cold spine.

Rather than work on the boat this morning, I thought it best to spend 5 hours shoveling snow off the shop roof.

Here's why:

 

a 30ft. x 60ft shop sports a total roof surface area of 1,800 ft^2

and here's the rub:

I took a flat blade shovel and sliced out one square foot of this snowfall and placed it on the bathroom scale.  Turns out that one square foot of this wet Oregon snow weighed in at over 15.2 lbs.

Multiply that times 1,800 ft^2 and that comes out to be 27,360 lbs of snow on top of a tin roof shop  framed out with 2 x 4's. 

With a prediction of snow changing over to a wet mix of sleet and rain, this snow could potentially soak up another 5 or 10 lbs per sq ft creating a total snow load of over

 22 tons!

After shoveling the snow off the shop, I came inside for a cup of hot chocolate and noticed visible bows in the ceilings of our house, so I shoveled another 15 tons of snow off the roof of the house.  Since I didn't have a snow shovel, today I moved 37 tons of snow with an upturned push broom.

"Who said building a boat isn't fun?" 

Anchor roller

Here are the anchor roller plates being fitted with flanges that will allow the anchor roller unit to be attached to the under side of the bow beam.  In this photo, I have already formed one of the flanges to fit the mating curve and have yet to bend the the other one.  To promote maximum bond strength, I machined a surface texture onto the mating flange.  These flanges will then be welded to the anchor roller plates. Once complete, this unit will be bonded to the bow beam by wrapping the flanges with multiple layers of unidirectional glass and carbon fiber.  After that, I will most likely wake up in the middle of the night and apply additional wraps of epoxy and carbon fiber in my sleep.

anchor roller plates

Anchor roller mock up

Rather than using construction string for my anchor rode and old paint rollers to secure my anchor, I figure an upgrade is in order.