Groups.IO

 In the summer of 2019 we purchased a house in North Fort Myers Florida. We spent several months working on our Ohio house to get it ready for sale. As a long time member of the Rossi Yahoo group and someone with an IT background I threw my name out there when the moderators asked for volunteers. 

Heading South

Just as we were about ready to drive down to Florida, I got a call from one of the moderators asking me if I would join them, I accepted and  by the time we got to Florida I was assisting in transitioning the Yahoo Group to Groups.IO as Yahoo was phasing out their groups.

Our new house is located in a 55 plus community in North Fort Myers, on the Caloosahatchee river. The village has its own marina which is now Cloud Nine's homeport. My first boat project down here was to replace my disintegrating door slides. I purchased 4 1.5" thick lengths of Starboard from another group member.  I used a table router to mill the slides and followed directions from another Rossi owner on how to do the replacement.

Starboard is relatively easy to work with using regular woodworking tools. My hot tub seems to be my work bench these days 😁

To replace the Port side slides I removed the cooktop and the refrigerator. Half of the screws are behind a plywood bulkhead. The screws were evenly spaced so I measured the approximate distance from one to another  and used 2 different hole saws, one with a pilot bit and another without to make sure I didn't drill into or through the hull.  

I used the old rails to mark the location of the screws and drilled pilot holes. I thought this would be wise as the old rails were all cracked where the screw holes were. It was really nice to not have to worry about losing my doors anymore. 

Between the Facebook group and the Groups.io Forum you meet a lot of people who feel like friends whether you have actually ever met them or not. So when the Websters, who were doing the loop mentioned how bad their rails were, and that they had been in contact with Rosborough USA for new rails, I told Bill to have them shipped to me and we can replace them in our Marina. Bill thanked me for the offer and before long the rails had arrived followed by the Websters.  Bill and I worked like a seasoned pit crew and  had them back in business by the end of the day. My wife Wendy described their rails as held together by duck tape and a prayer 😁  

The next day they were back on their way out to the Gulf , the Everglades and on to the Bahamas.