Having made polished stainless steel bezels for my Nimbus 280C motorboat’s cockpit lights from the bottom sections of two Indian spice pots (PBO March 2014), I next found a use for the lids.

The soft ‘hinge’ tabs of the rubber caps for my yacht’s transom shower and cold water tap had broken: the caps were barely held in place and at risk of falling out. The exteriors of the plastic fittings were also showing their age, but as the shower head, piping and cold water tap were still in very good condition and worked perfectly, replacement was not warranted.

The pot lids proved to be the perfect diameter to cover the plastic fittings, but first I needed to find a means of swinging them out of the way when the shower was in use.

I tried to locate a pair of suitably small stainless steel hinges on the internet and at boat jumbles but without success, eventually settling on two chrome-plated cranked brass hinges instead.

I carefully bent the ends of the cranked ‘arms’ of each hinge to follow the contour of the lids, then used masking tape to fix the hinges and lids together on a flat piece of wood so that I could mark each lid with the exact positions of the holes. I had some small stainless steel screws and nuts which I’d saved from other scrapped pieces of equipment. I covered the stainless lids with masking tape to protect the polished surfaces from swarf scratches, carefully drilled them to take the screws and filed off the burrs before attaching the hinges.

I taped the lids and hinges in their exact positions over the transom shower fittings and, having marked the hull, drilled it to take the stainless steel screws. It was then merely a case of using mastic under the hinges and screwing them to the hull. Limited space and the curve of the transom meant it was necessary to locate the hinge for the shower head cover at an angle. The tap cover was hinged vertically to the side. The covers are in a sheltered position and remain firmly shut without any locking device whatever the weather.