Are you tired of refinishing the wood aboard your boat? Has a wooden part aboard your boat rotted and needs replacement. Do you want durable and easy to clean surfaces aboard your boat? Something you can just wash down with a hose and not worry about drying?
Several months ago, I talked about filling in holes in Daydream. I patched two thru-hull openings, one for the overboard head discharge and one for a redundant transducer thru-hull.
Now that the entire boat, inside and out, has been sanded and the first coats of paint are being applied, it’s time for me to actually start making some holes in the boat, or at least remaking some.
A Columbia 26 has two deck drains and two cockpit drains, one of each on each side. Both drains on one side of the boat meet at a tee at the top of a seacock which in turn is fastened to a thru-hull. The old drains were pitted and dull. We decided to remove them temporarily to make painting the deck and cockpit easier.
The aft chain plates on Columbia 10.7 (as well as other boats) is a known problem. The chain plate for that shroud is attached to a short cabinet in the cabin. Over the years, the tabbing breaks and allows the chain plate to pull up on the deck, often cracking it and allowing water into the core.
I solved the problem by changing to a longer chain plate that extended below the cabinet and tying that chain plate to the lower stringer with a short cable. The stringer was also reinforced to resist the upwards pull of the shround. Pictures follow!
Of all the leaks aboard a boat, the hull/deck joint is probably the most persistent, hardest to find and hardest to fix of all. By the vary nature of the joint, water can travel great distances before appearing as a leak below deck. There are no magic bullets to fix these leaks but here are some tools
Hi Paul,
Hope you're hanging in against the forces of Mother Nature. Just had a
subscriber call asking about how best to treat rust on his Cal 20 keel.
His was the second call I've had on the topic. Wondered if you might
consider a Capt'n Pauley column on rusty keels. This last caller said,
"Do you think Paul would consider it?"
Best,
Josh
Well, it just so happens that my daughter and her friend just completed a keel job on their boat. It’s a little bigger than the Cal 20, but the principles are the same. Here goes!
A reader recently asked about making his hull smooth. It seems he did some major repair work on his hull and it didn’t look “smooth”. Now, in nautical lingo, a smooth flowing hull is called “fair” and the process of making the hull smooth is called “fairing”. A fair hull not only looks better but usually performs better too. Certain classes of racing sailboats go as far as to make templates to fair their keels and rudders. This ensures that those foils are of optimal shape and that all similar boats are, in fact, similar.
Hi Capt'n Pauley!
Hope you're hanging in against the forces of Mother Nature. Just had a
subscriber call asking about how best to treat rust on his Cal 20 keel.
His was the second call I've had on the topic. Wondered if you might
consider a Capt'n Pauley column on rusty keels. This last caller said,
"Do you think Paul would consider it?"
Best,
Josh
A recent post here on The Virtual Boatyard covered a process for replacing a rotted and water saturated transom. That process required cutting away the interior fiberglass layer, bonding in a new plywood core and re-laminating the interior transom wall. At best, this is no small task and requires the internal equipment and structure around the transom to be removed for access.
Continue reading "Alternative Transom, Deck and Stringer Repair" »
