Lost Star Yacht Club’s restoration-project quiz

An informative and entertaining self-examination


Anyone involved in restoring his own boat for any length of time will readily recognize the answer for each that best represents reality here!
(Note: as though you can’t guess, ALL of these are based on real-life experiences.)



The best-laid plans

Apparently, the previous owner of your boat was

1. A dedicated yachtie who kept it in pristine order
2. An older guy who let it go during the last few years he had it
3. A complete idiot

Carefully-drawn plans or instructions for your intended projects

1. Serve a valuable purpose in organizing, scheduling and budgeting the work
2. Give a general idea which usually gets changed once you start the work
3. Are likely to be left in the bathroom at home and thus disregarded in place of ‘just winging’ it when you’re already at the boat to work

Schedules and budgets are

1. Valuable guides to keeping a sense of sanity and proportion
2. Seldom absolute
3. Completely pointless

The last time you had a completely new idea about what to improve on the boat was

1. The last time you sailed it
2. Right before you began an organized plan of restoration
3. Five minutes ago

Parts catalogues will

1. Be worth browsing to what’s available and what can be ordered
2. Be important sources of ‘how-to’ information
3. Get comprehensively marked-up with underlining, highlighting, circling, arrows and diagrams as well as notes and gift hints to family members who will really never see or heed them

Tools of the trade

The average yacht restorer’s tools and supplies are stored in

1. A shiny metal rollaway tool chest with locking doors
2. A handmade mahogany-and-plywood toolbox
3. A mismatched collection of eleven (or is it twelve?) lidless containers and damp cardboard boxes, organized, if at all, in such a way that Rube Goldberg, Charles Manson and PeeWee Herman would consider it crazy

Your stepladder is

1. A new orange fiberglass one from Home Depot
2. An old aluminum one that has seen many years of dependable service
3. A really crappy wooden one that was surreptitiously ‘borrowed’ from some other guy in the boatyard

The tool vital to starting the next job will mostly likely be found in the

1. Tool box
2. Last place the tool was used
3. Bilge

Your electric extension cord is

1. A brand-new blue one, 100 feet long, 12-gauge, with a heavy-duty plastic recoiling reel and a molded-in 4-outlet box with circuit breaker
2. The two lengths of orange cord relied-upon for the hedge clippers at home
3. Possibly more duct and electrical tape than actual electrical insultation

A flashlight’s most common function is to

1. Illuminate poorly-accessible areas
2. Attack would-be burglars or wasps’ nests
3. Store dead batteries until you decide to throw them away

The usual condition of the average cordless drill/screwdriver’s batteries is

1. Both at full charge as soon as possible
2. The one in the unit dead, the other one charged and waiting in the charger
3. The one in the unit dead, the other one, which died last night, nowhere to be found

Wood plugs are frequently sealed in the screw holes using

1. Weldwood wood glue and an overnight drying process
2. WEST epoxy and an acid brush
3. The varnish, when you noticed the missing plug(s) right after you started to brush it on

Your boat-work shoes are

1. High-quality leather moccasin-type deck shoes
2. Sturdy, sensible work boots
3. A pair of ripped, stained and punctured CVOs with the soles completely blown-out or held together with duct tape; and your wife wonders why on earth they are still in the house

Rubber gloves and dust masks are

1. Essential, for safety and hygiene
2. Frequently necessary for really ugly jobs
3. Unheard-of

The procedures

You tend to have help in this project

1. Most of the time
2. About half the time
3. Pretty much never, unless you count the times when somebody from the yard comes by with a beer and talks while watching you work

‘Cutting corners’ in quality is

1. To be avoided
2. Sometimes necessary
3. Totally acceptable, so long as the task gets done

When you encounter a necessary task involving an area of expertise in which you have no experience, you will

1. Seek help from an expert
2. Read up on the procedure and treat it as a learning experience
3. Get out the tools and epoxy and start doing it

During a restoration, the bilge usually contains

1. Dirt and liquids, till they are cleaned or pumped out
2. Hoses and wiring that would be unsightly if run elsewhere
3. Wet pencils, locknuts and expensive electrical connectors you thought you mislaid and have had to buy again

When working on the boat, trash is

1. Stuffed into a 5-gallon paint bucket which is emptied at the dumpster each evening
2. Brushed into a corner of the cabin sole or cockpit
3. Pitched out the companionway hatch at the spur of the moment; and may God have mercy on the poor people who may have stopped below to look over the boat

Some of the fiberglass lay-ups in your boat may contain

1. Small air bubbles
2. Dust or wood chips
3. Sandwich lettuce, Dr Pepper and your blood

When installing fittings on spars, you will use

1. One thread tap, carefully maintained with oil
2. Maybe two or three taps
3. So many taps that you must make the 20 minutes’ trip from the boatyard to the auto-parts place several times a weekend

When you are kneeling or balancing on hull timbers to install new cabin-sole panels, the electric drill that gets in your way will most likely end up with the point of the new spade bitt in

1. The bilge
2. Some finished woodwork
3. Your leg

The usual procedure for electrolytically isolating stainless-steel fittings from aluminum spars involves

1. Applying nonconductive thread-locker liquid to the threads
2. Smearing both sides with white lithium grease
3. Sticking a piece of white electrical tape under the part before screwing it down

When cutting plywood outside, the rain will begin

1. The moment the pieces are cut
2. In the middle of the job
3. As soon as you have run the extension cord, clamped down the part, and switched on the jigsaw

The most valuable application of white Krylon is for

1. Gas grilles, bicycles and outdoor furniture
2. Models made of metal parts
3. Anywhere you neglected with Durawhite, Bilgekote, or Awlgrip when it’s time to put the boat in the water

When cutting Plexiglas, the typical experience will involve

1. A slow, clean cut with the jigsaw
2. Easily peeling off the protective paper backing
3. Having the blade get stuck in the middle of the cut when the material melts itself back together and then using hacksaws, grinders or lots of sanding to ultimately finish the part

When cutting G-10, you should use

1. A brand-new, fine-toothed jigsaw blade
2. An old blade that is almost ready to be thrown away anyway
3. Someone else’s blade (and saw)

With the spars out of the boat, the usual procedure for reeving new halyards involves

1. Carefully ‘sewing’ and whipping the braided messenger line to the new halyard
2. Tying the messenger line to a paperclip ‘buried’ into the new halyard
3. Hastily wrapping the messenger line to the new halyard with about half a roll’s worth of electrical tape

The 5200 is usually applied

1. In assemblies that must hold out seawater and are not likely to be dismantled in the regular course of maintenance
2. For anything and everything that goes together
3. All over the cabin sole, your knees, the clipboard, most of the tools and half of the sub sandwich you had intended to finish

The usual disposition of an unfinished tube of 5200 is to

1. Cap it so it stays airtight and store it in a cool dry place
2. Stick a machine screw down the nozzle and wrap tape over the end
3. Leave it where you last used it and expect to throw it away next week after the remaining half has cured in the tube

When painting decks or soles, the usual experience involves

1. Careful planning so that you can work from a ‘wet edge’ in painting from one end to the other
2. The occasional oversight requiring that you lean over wet paint to reach neglected dry spots
3. A completely disorganized nightmare involving spills, runs, blots and numerous opportunities to wear your work home

When the tarp that covers the boat needs to be changed, the wind will pick up

1. As soon as the new tarp is tied down
2. As soon as you arrive at the boatyard to do it
3. As soon as you get the old tarp stuffed into the dumpster and begin spreading the new one over the cabintop

Your primary motivation for doing painstaking work is one of

1. Interest in the value of your investment
2. Concern for the durability of the boat for the future
3. Pride, to demonstrate your superior ideas and craftsmanship

After-work bathing typically entails

1. A long refreshing shower
2. A rush to finish and get on to other tasks
3. Dishwashing liquid, Fast Orange and Scotch-Brite to remove all the paint, 5200, epoxy and resin from your raw skin

Beat the odds

The likelihood of damaging or dislocating a seacock is inversely proportionate to

1. The cost of the seacock
2. The importance of the supply line attached to the fitting
3. The need to replace it

The likelihood of drilling a hole through a spar or bulkhead and breaking into a length of electrical or plumbing conduit is inversely proportionate to

1. The cost of the conduit
2. The importance of the hole you’re drilling
3. The amount of time left before the Travel-Lift comes

The likelihood of tossing a screwdriver up into the boat and damaging something is directly proportionate to

1. The cost of the screwdriver you toss
2. The proximity of the object it hits
3. The amount of work you put into what it hits

An example of an unexpected negative correlation may exist between

1. The quality of the varnish job and the cost of the foam brushes
2. The cost of a VHF radio and the time it takes to receive it from the supplier
3. The time and effort you take to install the paper-towel holder and the importance of the paper-towel holder to the overall project

The costs

The way to really recognize a yacht owner who is performing his own work is by

1. His smile of sublime satisfaction at the launching banquet
2. His nearly-empty wallet at the end of the weekend
3. The 5200 under his fingernails at church

One of the most humiliating things about taking so long to restore your boat is

1. Your friends’ nagging impatience to go sailing
2. Paying 12-month dry-storage contracts
3. Discovering that the state-of-the-art CD stereo system and FireWire computer network you installed 4 years ago have become obsolete before you got to use them

One way to be sure you’ve spent too much money on parts is by

1. The smiles on the faces of the staff at West Marine
2. Your wife’s interrogation about the Visa bill
3. The way the UPS guy, who is not a yachtie, is on a first-name basis with your dog and knows all about the product lines carried by Defender.com

The Bible verse that may best approximate the current status of your restoration project is

1. Hebrews 11:7 (‘By faith Noah, divinely warned, built this ark to save his family’)
2. Ezekiel 15:3 (‘Is wood from this tree fit to make anything useful?’)
3. Luke 14:30 (‘This man began to build, and could not finish’)

Life lessons learned

One thing you’ve found out about yourself that you never expected is that

1. You’ve learned many new things and gained a priceless experience
2. You have physical strength and stamina you didn’t know you had
3. Falling sweat actually splashes

By now you are convinced that marine-toilet plumbing should be

1. Replaced every three years
2. Replaced by every new owner
3. Made of heliarc-welded and polished 3-inch schedule-40 type-316 stainless-steel pipe and never changed at all

One maintenance cycle you did not expect to need to know is that

1. Bottom paint, no matter how old, should be reapplied within two weeks of launching
2. Spars should be removed and inspected every three years
3. The screw threads on jackstands should be oiled annually

When your restoration project is complete, you will know your boat

1. Better than most yacht owners know their own boats
2. Enough to trust it in nearly any conditions
3. More intimately than you know your wife

Your restoration project has taken

1. More or less the amount of time you expected it would
2. A season longer than you expected
3. Several years longer than you expected

The one most likely to perform future major maintenance and repair on your boat is

1. A trusted yacht-service facility
2. The next owner
3. You

When the boat is finished

The quarter berth

The first-series H25 came with a 12-foot-long berth to port.  Having come up with the original concept for this interior when I was 14 or 15, I suggested that the ‘nav station’ be its own little cubbyhole but got vetoed by budget and marketing at Hunter, perhaps the first of many rude awakenings over the years about how these two departments, not engineering and design, govern how boats get made.  So when I got an H25 for myself I was determined, as with the bridge deck, to rectify this fault and create something cooler about my boat for myself.
 

Immediately ahead of the quarter-berth I added a bulkhead to correspond to the forward bulkhead of the galley on the other side.  In this photo the camera is leaning on the vertical grab post that terminates the inboard end of that bulkhead.  But the original space was only 12’0” long, a kind of head-to-head double bunk.  Putting in this bulkhead left the quarter bunk about 5’8”.  So I would extend it.

[photo 2011.09 q.berth 1a.jpg]

Fortunately on poor Diana, the after bulkhead here, at the foot, being the mounting space for the (dumb) idea of the gas-can locker, had got so rotten from the boat’s being operated with the hatch open in rain that I was able to remove it... with no tools.  One of the first things I did was to build a new bulkhead 9 inches farther aft and make a shelf over the foot end.  It appears as a winch-handle shelf in the cockpit-seat hatch.  The same shelf extends forward over the foot of the bunk, making a duffel-bag locker there (see the one at the far end, here cluttered with small boards and other stuff).  The lockers along the side were an afterthought.  I had a piece of wood in my hand, going around the boat fitting it into places, and suddenly got the Eureka idea to make what we used to have on C44s up front, the underwear, t-shirt and swimsuit ‘stuff lockers’ over the bunk.

This side locker face was VERY hard to fit properly.  There was no structure here to rely upon-- I was measuring things in thin air.  It is not parallel to the centreline nor to the angled side of the bunk.  Immediately forward of it, in the space where the fiddle-rail shelf used to be, is the electrical panel.  (In the photo the panel is lying back in the bunk with two rectangular holes for the switch panels.  It appears here face-down; the switch panels are to the right when you look at it.)  This was hard to fit against the back of the cabin but I finally just left the end long and figured I’d make some kind of bin in the back end, over the end of the fiddle-rail shelf.  This end of the electrical panel actually formed a good anchoring point for this new locker face.  I mounted it with no bottom and cut the bottom to fit.  It’s bonded to the hull with 5200, lending strength and stiffness in this notoriously flimsy area.
 

The fit of the overhead of this space has yet to be determined.  I intend the roof of the locker for the shotgun but have to install the traveler and backing plates before I can see what I have to screw the hinges and latches to.
 

The bit of what looks like plain trashy plywood in the back of the crosswise locker is a bit of plain trashy 3/8” CDX plywood I had been using for templates and the like till one day I got the silly idea to make dividers for these lockers out of it.  Diligently I fit the pieces, sanded them carefully (try sanding CDX some time!) and saturated them in Salem sealer before installing them.  As such they’re adequate for humidity and will last ages.  Another divider is visible beside the blue duffel bag.  One of them I signed (before the varnish and installation) as a tongue-and-cheek reminder to the next owner that I really did know what I was doing using this plain trashy plywood and that it was meant as a joke.  The one in the back blocks off a ragged piece of ‘glass from the earlier bunk-foot structure.
 

The little cubbyhole down at the far end is where the original after bulkhead was-- its forward bulkhead is heavily ‘glassed to the hull.  The two blades of ‘glass after where I cut it off have remained strong even though the wood between it was rotten to nothing.  There’s still some (good) wood in there.  The inside of this locker isn’t pretty-- I put it there mainly to trim off the remains of what had been there.  I had to make a floor in it, uncharacteristically blocking off the space below to keep things from disappearing into an invisible and almost inaccessible wedge in there.  I call this locker ‘Indiana’ because its plywood face is the shape of that state only mirrored.  Beneath the foot of the bunk, beyond the original bulkhead (still there under the bunktop), is another locker against the inside of the hull.  If you were to peel up the front of the mattress some day you would assume there are only the two stock traps under the bunk; so it might be a good hiding spot.  But I’ve just said that in this blog; so you can rest assured that’s not the only secret spot this boat holds!
 

I will take other photos of the under-cockpit area and the ladder but I have been waiting to pretty it up with more trim.  I have been going up and down that ladder about 6 years now and only recently have I considered that the treads might like another coat of varnish.  Captain’s Varnish is made for spars and is excellent for durability as well as UV protection.
 

The trim around the lockers came from C44 hull 5, which was in for restoration while I was collecting scrap wood.  The wood is only 3 years younger than this (1974) boat.  The trim around the teak cabin back looks washed-out from the flash, but it is really more golden than the long-varnished other stuff, and it is all Honduras mahogany (not the pretend stuff you get now).  I just screwed it on and let the screws show-- it’s too thin for plugs and it’s how the trim was originally on this boat.  I also don’t believe in staining wood that’s already pretty.  I leave it as-is, apply sealer and then Captain’s Varnish and let it have its own identity.  So the interior appears a mix-up of varying wood colors, which is exactly how it should be.  It reflects the reality and naturalness of the natural material.  (Also it is much less work.)  I tried a bit of stain on a bit of mahogany-plywood bulkhead and even though I used only a very little it got so black that it was downright ugly and I remade the piece and just varnished it as-is. Varnished mahogany marine plywood, going back to the Cherubini Sea Scamp days, is as much of my heritage as are original artwork, Roman Catholicism and frozen waffles.  In this boat I am surrounded by what I am.

* * *

Reverse-Mooyock technology

  My cousin Rick has a philosophy by which he believes that sometimes the best solution is the simplest.  We were talking about a C44 that was built-- because the buyer insisted-- with a sea chest, a watertight compartment with one opening to the sea and into which all through-hulls empty at once.  The theory is anti-technology-- in the question of a leak, shut off the one opening and that's all you have to worry about.  Rick's point was that, in the face of all the complexity and clutter, the easiest thing was just to add another seacock and through-hull.  It's a boat-- just check it like anything else you check and you're fine.  Why complicate anything?  So if the head sink's drain were leaking you'd shut off the engine intake?  Really?  'The best solution is the simplest.'

  My brother Steve was working out in Wisconsin recently, doing cabinetry and later restoration work on old wooden runabouts.  Apparently there are many of them out there; they don’t tend to rot in the cold dry weather the way they do in Florida or at the NJ shore.  And, this shop being the land of cordless drill/drivers. everyone had the Bosch or Makita setup with the two batteries, one of which is perpetually in the charger.  But the thing about a cordless driver is that, in production, one needs about four batteries and will need to replace them more often than most people do.  Most of us know that lithium tool batteries develop a ‘memory’-- they remember how long they went from charge to charge and if you charge them too often, say at only 40% of the way down, they will develop a working life of only 40% of capacity.  Like a lazy production drudge they will get to their frustration level and announce, ‘Break time!’ and then pack it in for the day till you recharge them.

  The general advice for those using such tools is to run the battery all the way down till the last breath of life and then give it a full, healthy (overnight) charge.  This becomes problematic for the production worker, who is caught between two undesirable extremes.  Either he exchanges the battery for a fresh one at the first hint of slowdown-- and thus costs himself in reduced productivity and replacement batteries in future, or he endures a slowly-fading battery for much too long, suffering through extremely slow and powerless work just to save the tool.

  One day Steve and his boss were trying to come to grips with this problem and Steve suggested, ‘If only we had a way to deplete this battery without having to use it on the job.  What kills 12-volt batteries really fast?’

  The boss, what we Italians would call (and politely spell as) a mooyock, contributed his idea.  ‘Well, I don’t know about tools; but what kills my car battery is when I leave the headlights on.’

  And Steve got the Eureka moment.

  Having just upgraded the high-beam headlamps on his classic BMW, he brought in the old pair, made a beautiful bracket of plywood, mounted the lights in it high on the wall over the shop area, and ran the leads down to a battery dock on the bench.  The battery de-charger will drain a half-done cordless-drill battery in about a quarter of the time actually using it will; it provides light-- for a while at least-- costs nothing to use and saves the long-term life of the battery.  No production shop should be without one.
 

  When I heard about this I laughed so hard I couldn’t see straight.  ‘It’s reverse-mooyock technology!’ I called it-- the whole concept of using a klutz’s answer to solve an intricate problem.  Sometimes the stupidest, lamest, most mooyock of suggestions really is the most elegant solution.

* * *

The bridge deck

  One of the periennial drawbacks of the 1972-1978 series of the H25 is the lack of a mainsail sheet traveler.  Some clever people have fabricated one on brackets across the aft end of the cockpit.  This is not a bad idea and the sheetline leads are not too bad.  Putting one on the cabin roof, as many do with other boats, would place the mainsheet so far forward as to be utterly useless (except as a vang).  Moving the sheeting point forward on a boom is never good anyway-- mid-boom sheeting is a significant loss of mechanical advantage as well as a loss of sail trim.

  Those with mostly-original H25s will notice that the early H25’s boom is about a foot longer than it has to be.  The foot of the mainsail is designed to be at about 8’8”.  The boom which should be about 9 ft is more like 10' on some boats.  This was to extend the sheeting point, at the after end of the boom, far enough aft to connect to a single block at the back of the cockpit coaming.  This was the Cherubini-and-Seidelmann solution that enabled them to keep that lovely little egg-shaped cockpit surround.

  Part and parcel with the lack of a traveler is the lack of a bridge deck.  No one venturing offshore in any sized boat should have a hatch opening down into the cockpit pan.  Some people have said that keeping one or two hatch boards in is enough to keep most of the big stuff out; but remember that wooden boards float! --and in anything big enough to poop the whole cockpit you run the risk of one or more of the boards floating off and out of your life for ever.  Of course you could argue that in weather like that you’d have the whole hatch closed-up and when it’s nicer out you could have the whole thing open for air and convenience. But we singlehanders don’t like to leave any more than necessary in a state of needing attention as the weather escalates.

  The construction of a bridge deck on the H25 is an obvious solution to this two-pronged problem.  It provides a place to mount the traveler that is not too far forward of the end of the boom and effectively blocks the water’s access to the lower third or even 40 percent of the open hatchway’s space.  Its only drawback is having to step over it like one has to on just about every other seagoing yacht anyway.

  My first design for this involved a really cool folded-aluminum bracket that spanned the after end of the proposed bridge deck with legs down the sides of the cockpit pan to take the shear load of the traveler.  A gusset plate welded across the after side made it stiff and gave a place to mount the compass and engine-start switch.  I cut a plywood template and fitted it into the three-dimensional wedged space till I could screw it to the cockpit with sheet-metal screws and get good measurements.  (Look on the picture at the hole in the side of the cockpit pan, under the after edge of the deck-- this is where the mock-up's leg was screwed.)

  But no one would weld my bracket cheaply enough.  I wanted it for 60 bucks.  (‘It’s just a bent piece of metal!’)  The best quote I had was over $200.  That was out.

  Then I bought some aluminum angle from McMaster-Carr and started to fabricate a bracket by myself, mainly bolting it together.  The more pieces I put together (and paid for) the less I seemed to need each one.  Then my cousin Lee said, ‘Why don’t you just ‘glass it?’

  So I did.

  Mind that it was VERY hard to fit this thing.  The cockpit seats slope upwards as they go aft and the cockpit sides slope outwards as they go forward and inwards as they go down. By the time I’d got it screwed into the only place it could go and got one layer of ‘glass and epoxy on it, I found out one corner was too low.  So I built it up with more ‘glass and ground it fair again, and it’s thicker in one corner than elsewhere.  (I won’t tell you which corner.  You'll never be able to tell when it's done.)

  The piece of teak came from the old CBC shop which, in the process of being taken-over a long time ago, built big bulky trawler yachts about as cheaply as they could be made.  One of the ‘savings’ was from buying very bendy (and fragile) ready-made panels of teak decking. The 2-inch planks, about 5/16” thick (same as we made our teak decks on C44s) are already bonded together with Thiakol, the same stuff production teak decks used to use before we at CBC (and many others) discovered black 5200.  This piece was a scrap from the trash.  I cut it in its appropriate trapezoid and bent it over the very mild, but correct, crown from seat to seat.

  Once I was happy with the fit I figured out a very annoying but structurally-sound way to screw it in place from the bottom and test-installed it.  Owing to the thickness issues with the plywood substrata it wasn’t exactly flush all the way around.  I solved this by putting masking tape over the screw holes on the bottom, running a fat bead of 5200 round the perimeter, and then setting it down with clamps.  Relying on the 5200 ‘dam’ around the edges I drilled a few little holes in the top and flooded the uneven space between the teak and the plywood with WEST epoxy, the same as I do to repair damaged deck core inside ‘glass decks.  Then I torqued up the clamps and gave it a few days.

  The result is so strong that it probably doesn’t need the metal traveler support, but I’m putting it underneath anyway, just to spare my little artistic creation from literally flying off the handle in some nasty jibe some day.  This bridge deck allows for the mounting of the traveler about 9-1/2” aft of the cabin back, which is about 9-12 inches in from the back end of the sail.  That’s good enough for only one boom bail and fiddle blocks.  The Schaefer traveler setup has double blocks with cam cleats at each end, better than the clunky setup we had on our Raider 33, Antigone, with cam cleats mounted vertically above the traveler-control blocks so that it could only be adjusted from above, not from abaft.

  The Schaefer 1-1/8" track has holes 4” on center.  If I center one hole, one on each side goes into the gap between the teak and the ‘glass.  I have to settle on two in the center, each 2” from the centerline.  That just means I have to be particular about where I cut the track.   It takes a 60” piece, which is ideal (part 42-75).

  Along the gaps beside the teak deck will be lines of black 5200 which will resemble the Thiakol.  Amazingly-- for clearly there was some divine intervention-- I got the slivers of the outer planks more or less even and the central plank on center.  How that happened I don’t know, so don't thank me.

  The waterstains are from a leak in the aging cover.  They will sand out and I am not concerned at this point.  Eventually this teak will go silver in the tropical sun-- which is what it's supposed to do.

   So now I may have the only original-series Hunter 25 with a teak deck (ha!).

   I had intended to put the compass on a ‘dashboard’ underneath this but my neck is bad enough from using a computer already and you never want to take your eyes too far from the way ahead to steer compass courses.  I have two compasses, one from this boat and one from a wreck, and I will mount one on each side in the back of the cabin.  The current hole on the port side won’t used as it is balanced with two holes for wind gauges to starboard; so the starboard compass will be mounted below them, rather low on the bulkhead, and the other one in the corresponding place to port.

  The wood behind the hole is the epoxied back of the teak plywood laminated to the inside of the cabin top.

  The photo shows the top of the patch I made over the old deep hatch opening.  Having planned this bridge deck from the start I left the teak plywood on the inside all the way up (it was once much higher than this) and so was able to lay up half a dozen layers of mat and cloth with WEST epoxy (much of which dribbled into the cockpit pan-- see the brownish staining-- and created an increased fillet along the forward edge).  It isn’t a perfectly-smooth layup because it doesn’t have to be; only the beer cooler and cockpit bucket ever have to see it under there (though it will get more or less faired just the same before Perfection).  Above the teak it matters because a mahogany block with a white-ash threshhold gets fitted to it; and after that I can establish and install the hatch-slider boards.

  Since this picture I have cut out the bottom and sides of this hole and dry-fitted the ash threshold and the mahogany under it.  At finished height it's only about 2-1/4" above the deck now.

  The black Plexiglass deadlight admits light to the quarter berth.  As of this photo it's only dry-fitted.

  The thing along the side that looks like teak Formica is the original cabin table which isn’t going to be reused because:

  1. it’s teak (or pretending to be);

  2. it does not fit to the bulkhead and new compression post as I would like it to;

  3. it weighs about 850 pounds.
  I just never seem to throw out any part until I am absolutely sure I won’t ever need it again. I saved the original weatherbeaten hatch boards too and just recently figured out how I can reuse them on this new opening.

  The can of Bio Blast came from a WM closeout.  I like it but it doesn’t work as well as StripEaze does.  I’d much rather be bio-friendly but there is such a thing as getting the job done; and this job desperately needs to be done.

  Down below can be seen the grab-post and the top of the bulkhead I added between the saloon berth and the quarter berth.  Above the quarter berth is the cabinet for the VHF and the wallets-and-sunglasses compartment (here stuffed with clean shop towels).

  There is another picture somewhere of the head compartment forward.

  As I have mentioned before, all the of the trim wood on this boat, beyond the ash threshold, the teak plywood of the cabin bulkhead, and this bit of real teak decking, is mahogany.  None of this teak will be finished with anything; but the ash will be saturated (as well as ash can ever be) with WEST epoxy and given about 19 coats of Captain’s Varnish for good measure. Much of the mahogany came from remodelling old C44s.  Also I consider it a much prettier wood; and of course whatever I got from old C44s is REAL Honduras, not what you get now, rosier and deeper and more beautiful.  And I am amused to think it’s almost as old as Diana is; so that’s fitting

* * *

Fairing the keel

  Apparently the mold from which this all-lead keel came wasn’t perfect.  One side is definitely better shaped than the other.  Someone at Hunter R&D back then was a little slack.

  My dad had a book of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) aerofoil shapes which he used in developing keel sections.  But do not be too literal or liberal when it comes to applying what we know of airplanes to explain the ‘black science’ of yacht design.  The two are not directly analogous.  For one thing, an airplane wing, though it must minimize drag, does not generate thrust, only lift.  A sail generates thrust as well as lift.  A keel generates lift; but the standard single-keeled sailboat must be symmetrical; thus even as one side generates upwind lift, the other side, being the same shape, tries to negate it.  It’s kind of like the reason why a helicopter can’t go as fast as an airplane.

  For the curious or just terminally nerdish there is some good information on Wikipedia about the NACA shapes.  I don’t know where my dad’s book has got to but Wikipedia makes it easier to find.  I suppose I am just too lazy to learn this stuff any more; but I promise you my dad was a genius at trigonometry and talked aerofoils like some people talk baseball stats, second-nature and effortlessly.

  After I rebedded and faired the hull-keel joint I took a few power tools to smooth out the shape.  I was frustrated that the right side would just not get as lean and flat as the left side-- until I observed that I was starting to grind lead.  (No, Mom, I didn’t have a mask on.  No, I don’t care.  I’ve spent a lifetime doing this stuff.)  So the task had to be to fill out the slacker left side, the side I’d thought was the better of the two.

  Upon further inspection I realize that the right side really is better.  Right now Diana has about 3/16” of putty on the left side, in attempts to flesh out the keel shape.  At the root (where an aerofoil meets the hull or fuselage) a little too much chord is probably better than too little. It’s not where lift is created but where drag has to be reduced, including that of skin friction.  But it’s also where strength can be had from surface area; so I am making the keel fatter here.

[2011.09 keel 1a.jpg]

  Photo 1 shows the right side.  You can see the obvious convex curve in the root of the keel; the small dark oval shape on the hull is just about right over the chord point.  The keel is about 5 inches wide here.  This is as it should be.

  The two roundish patches are from the removal of the toilet through-hulls.  I put duct tape over the hole on the outside, cut out ‘cookies’ of fibreglass mat and lay them up on the inside, roller out all the bubbles (using some pressure), and then go out and grind off the resulting bulge that pushed out against the duct tape. Imagine if you patched it on the inside first-- and then you would never, ever, be able to lay up ‘glass over your head without having bubbles.  Doing it once the wrong way, I learned. Now you know-- so you have no excuse to repeat my mistake.

[2011.09 keel 3a.jpg]

Photo 2 shows the left side.  This was so slack along the root that I had to carry the filler aft to the trailing edge.  Someone had ‘glassed over the trailing edge with a cuff of glass that was, in alternate places, either barely hanging on or impossible to remove.  I ripped the whole thing off, faired the lead where trapped water had helped the lead corrode into alarmingly-wide striations, and applied the olive putty. Wherever the putty is were low spots.  It is faired and smooth in this photo, despite the color changes, but it is not out to where it should be yet.

  Since this photo I came back after too long a hiatus and applied more putty and then woke in the middle of the night realizing I had stupidly used the fairing compound (the white) and not the structural one (the olive).  I actually had forgotten what the stuff looked like uncured (the can labels are too messy to read now).  So I will fair off the white and just apply more olive.  My cousin Lee likes the WM structural putty, which is like the more expensive 3M variety. ‘Sticks to anything and won’t fall out,’ he says.  Back in the CBC days we used to make it out of a variety of nasty things, including chopped fibers from the chopper-gun and even actual sand, calling it ‘mishmash’ or ‘Dark Vader’, and kicked it with (a lot of) plain MEKP.  The prepackaged stuff contains plain fibers about 1-1/2” long and comes with cream hardener.  It’s easy to work with and easy to sand fair.  I will just have to have a sandwich of olive-white-olive on the left side; but so long as it’s all adhering it won’t be a problem.  This keel joint has so much 5200 in there that even a slight horizontal crack someday won’t be anything to worry about.

  What did I say once about most boat work being half mooyock?  Guilty as charged.

  The whitish places farther down are bare lead where the bottom paint parted.  This bottom paint is very old, and it’s copper-based.  The cupro-nickel content applied directly to the bare keel for use in salt water caused some chemical decomposition of the lead.  NEVER apply bottom paint to bare metal.  Even spraying the metal with Krylon before bottom-painting is better than leaving the metal unprotected. I will trowel Interprotect or maybe even just WEST epoxy all over this keel before painting the bottom again.  I just do not know how much I will worry about existing bottom paint with good adhesion.  You can see here I’ve puttied right on top of it.  If it’s sticking that well, why rip it off? I can fair any imperfections before the paint stage.

  The hull itself is actually in very good condition but for the sake of weight, ease of fairing and general anal-retentiveness I have been stripping it with Bio-Blast and, when that did not work, StripEaze.  The light-colored region above the keel, forward of the darker, is where I have stripped some.  So long as there is a little bit of blueish tint to the white where I have scraped off paint, I know it did not chemically attack the gelcoat.  The bluish tint will be fair enough to just apply paint right to it (if no more work is needed).

* * *

The keel-hull joint.

This was the single most problematic fault with the condition of the boat as I got it and, as it turns out, one of the most easily remedied.  Sometimes the dumbest fixes are the best ones.  (See the post on ‘Reverse-Mooyock Technology’.)  The PO had perceived either cracks or actual leaking in the keel/hull joint and was able to arrange the the yard’s Travellift to hold up the boat so he could loosen the keel bolts and apply new bedding compound.  Unfortunately he did not know his ‘caulk’ from his ‘bedding compound’ and apparently went into the marina store and asked for ‘caulk’.  Now caulking is used on wooden boats, to provide a watertight seal between planks that may not planed perfectly straight or do not meet perfectly together. The secret is that the compression of the swelling planks squeezes against the caulking and makes it watertight.  (I have heard stories of Barnegat Bay garveys that don’t use caulking at all; the yellow-pine planks swell terribly, jamming edge-to-edge against each other, from the first minute it’s in the water and after about three days stop leaking altogether.  This is why yellow pine is NOT code for house construction; and it's why pressure-treated deck lumber, which is yellow pine, changes dimensions over time.)

The PO should have asked for bedding compound which is meant to be phenomenally strong under tensile loads, opposite loads pulling apart from each other.  The often-infamous 5200, properly applied to clean surfaces, will hold 700 pounds per square inch.  It's meant for holding on lead keels.  Don’t even consider ‘caulk’, polysulphide, silicone or other such nonsense for this role.  Unfortunately my boat’s PO didn’t know that.

After too long a time worrying about how to fix this, the solution hit me almost literally on the head.  I bought some lengths of little 1/2” steel pipe intending to have the boat jacked up and then set down with those pipes lying between the hill and the keel, propping it up so I could reach in there, scrape it clean and rebed to reassemble the boat.  One day adjusting the jackstands I realized that all this worrying was idiotic-- the boat without the keel weighs only about 2200 lbs.  So I loosened all the keel bolts, taking the nuts up to the top of the threads leaving about 7/8” to work with, and then under the boat I went about screwing the jackstands up.  I even put a prop under the sloping forward edge of the keel to keep it from toppling over (which would be catastrophic; for how would I pick up the fallen keel with the boat still on stands above it?).  Every day I went down and turned the stands another turn or so.  One day I was turning the stand under the bow with my back to the boat and and I heard a rubbery stretching noise behind my head.  I turned about and saw the ugly caulk parting from the keel-- the boat had risen about 3/4” from just the stands alone.  Once I got everything aligned it was a very simple matter to pick out all the residue to put in new 5200.

I scrubbed and sanded and scraped till I had two very clean surfaces in surprisingly good condition.  But I couldn't understand why the opened slot between the hull and the top of the keel kept appearing to be more in front than in back.  I kept adjusting the stands and still could not account for it till a fellow yard rat suggested, ‘The keel’s probably falling over.’  Sure enough it appeared that the keel was probably leaning forward, in spite of the prop, and just walking the boat forward on all the stands.  How far would it go?  I wouldn't wait to find out.

‘Right,’ I said to my daughter there.  ‘Tomorrow we get the 5200.’

I bought two fresh tubes, and the joint took that and all the rest I had lying about.  I just pumped in as much as the opened gap would hold.  Then we let down the jackstands and about half of it oozed out.  That got all nicely puttied over the whole seam area.  I made backing plates of G-10 and installed them in the bilge, leaving a space between the keel bolts for water to run back to the pump.  To preserve the threads from the 5200 (which would have barred any future adjustment) I wrapped the threads in masking tape.  Since then it’s been adjusted a few times, mainly to satisfy my worry, and it’s been fine.

One day my cousin Dave had to move the boat to the other side of the yard.  I didn’t know this was going to happen and when I heard I dreaded finding some disaster about my keel-bolt fix. The hull’s flexing under the load of the keel when it was picked up had caused my new cabin-sole joists to part from the hull-- but the keel-bolt nuts hadn’t even been torqued up properly and the 5200 held the whole thing on for the jaunt across the yard.  So-- no more worry as to that.

* * *