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Salt & Tar: Ep.338- Succeed or Fail
April 23, 2026 · 25 min · 49K views · Rocky Point, Mexico
What this video covers
Garrett and Ruth continue the major refit of Red Aviva, their 35-foot wooden boat, at a boatyard in Penasco, Mexico. A rented workbench — $40 a month from the yard owner — anchors their expanding shop setup.▶ 0:04 The pilot house build dominates the episode: Garrett cuts and glues a scarfed joint from two quarter-inch plywood sheets to form the first seamless layer of the curved roof, using a temporary beam to hold the crown shape during lamination.▶ 16:43 Ruth applies biaxial cloth tape around the cabin-to-deck corner seam using Total Fair fairing compound and epoxy, but mixes too large a batch without wetting out the surface first; the epoxy kicks, smokes, and nearly combusts, leaving her to cut away the ruined section.▶ 14:14 Her takeaway: ask for help sooner and wet out cloth and substrate before the epoxy goes down.▶ 14:15 The rudder comes off using the mizzen boom as a crane — pintles show electrolysis damage from dissimilar metals.▶ 2:44 Gary, a race-car fabricator and boatyard neighbor, inspects the hardware, measures corrosion at 50,000ths, and agrees to fabricate two new pintles and a stern housing from single-piece stock, then powder-coat everything and ship them to Phoenix.▶ 21:09 Garrett and Ruth also drive north to retrieve their nearly complete 10-foot dinghy, Little Red, loading it with spars, rudder, and daggerboards for transport back to Penasco.▶ 23:31
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