Replacement cockpit drains - Take Two

18-19 July 2014

I don't think I mentioned this before, so....

The small brass fittings I installed about two seasons ago (here) were really too small.  After making a big deal out of putting them in, I decided to replace them with the very idea I have been advising other H25 owners to do for many years.

The original H25 drains were RC Marelon through-hulls straight out the back wall of the cockpit-- necessitating that water either climb up the 5/8" threshold to flow out or else stay in the cockpit pan.  I installed the little brass drains in the sole itself, fitted them with 90-degree elbows and though them good enough.  After consulting with my friend Roland (SV Moonshine) about his solo Atlantic crossing, I decided too big can never be big enough.

The fix I have been long suggesting for this entails the fitting of a rigid fiberglass tube straight out the very bottom corner of the cockpit pan through the transom.  In what has to be the most productive two two-hour work sessions I have ever had on this boat (even in the face of predicted rain), I drilled the holes, bedded these into place, removed the old ones and filled and faired the old holes.  I did one one day and one the next, after a full day of work each time.  It impressed even myself!

 

Here's the view from the cockpit.  The tubes are 1" inside, 1-1/4" outside diameter, pressed fiberglass, ordered from McMaster-Carr.  It was about $21 for one 60-inch piece, which, cut in half, fit perfectly for this application.  I deliberately made the cut on an angle, twisting each tube in its hole in order to fill the corner (shorter side inboard).  Bedded in 5200 and faired with WEST epoxy and Microlight, they look like they were molded there.

 

At the transom I allowed the excess length to just stick out and, when the epoxy had dried, cut them shorter with a hacksaw and used the orbital sander to smooth them over.  This picture doesn't show it so well, but the factory's installation wasn't symmetrical-- one old hole (filled as of this picture) will appear closer to the new tube than the other side.  I just eyeballed the site from above, applied a ruler and made them lead  out parallel to the centerline, straight aft from the corners of the cockpit pan.

The green tape covers the HIN.  I got some epoxy into it a while ago and decided to preclude any more messing it up.

The other two through-hulls are the Marelon ones I installed for the bilge pumps.

 

Looking under the cockpit the downward angle and parallel leads are seen clearly.  The duct tape is part of one of my 'mooyock' solutions for filling holes.  When the old through-hulls were taken out (with hammer and chisel), I taped over the holes in the inside and made up 'communion wafers' of fiberglass to stuff into the voids from the outside with epoxy.  Why try to fill a hole that's overhead or angled so that the epoxy will only dribble out?

This isn't a great view of it, but below the tubes is a little floor I installed aft of the low bulkhead in the foreground.  This low bulkhead, a little higher than the waterline, will contain water from any rudder-post leaks in the event of a rudder strike (which should be high on the list of any sailor's worst nightmares).  A small hole, here seen stained in epoxy, is fitted with a brass tube which will accommodate one of those little rubber transom-drain plugs.  It's not the most secure arrangement; but it's much better than having nothing at all in the event of this happening, for which Stephen Dashew says your best scenario is to crack the rudder blade.  Any other possibility involves catastrophic damage to the hull-- and, with your average production spade-rudder boat, probably the end of your voyage.

 

This pic, with the fuel tank in place, shows the upper end of the cockpit-drain tube.  With the little brass things in place, there had to be an elbow over the back edge of the tank that seriously complicated attaching fuel hoses and intruded on space for removing the tank.  Now this is practically structural-- no worries for stuff in the lazzarette weighting down the drain hoses till they fail or pop off.

(The dark spot on the tank is an old epoxy spill, not a leak or any damage.  This tank has been kicking about this boat for very long, getting dusty and spilled-upon, and only now (September) is is finally in its place for good.  Of course I've kept all the openings well taped-up!)

* * *

Finally! --it's paint.

9-10 October 2014

I have been procrastinating the hull paint on this boat for an inordinate time.  This is really 'just because' --I truly haven't felt like investing the time and effort into it till now.  But I've had the gallon kit of Interlux Primekote for a while, just for when I decided to do it, and so I finally bowed to the constant encouragement of my friend and boatyard neighbor Jerry (C44 Second Alarm) and together we attacked this.

 

(The spots on the bottom are my repair of some hull cracks that had spread through the Pettit Protect barrier coating that I applied last year.  Discovering these was distressing; but I've been determined to have this boat done properly and so the Dremel took was applied right through it and WEST epoxy, with milled fibers as filler, was troweled into the gouges.  As of now it's really pretty good.)

 

Jerry did the rolling and I was going to try tipping it, for which I bought a couple of really good brushes, but we found that Primekote doesn't want to be tipped.  We also found that it should be thinned more than the 20% the label advises-- I approximated about 25% (or a little more) into each batch.  We mixed 5 batches of about 20 ounces each and this did a little more than two full coats of the hull.  Jerry was a champion with the rolling and really made the paint spread well with virtually no heavy spots.

 

Earlier pics will show the extensive repair on the transom.  Upon removing the center-mounted backstay tang, I discovered its load had sort of impressed upon the transom, creating a hollow.  I filled this with new 'glass and plenty of WEST epoxy with Microlight.  With Jerry's help I sanded the entire hull with 80 grit, and then 120 grit, using DryGuide, this marvelous black powder that, applied to the hull before sanding, illustrates clearly where your highs and lows are.  Sand it all off and it's fair-- and, amazingly, that stuff does not lie.  This hull is incredibly fair-- and, in some places, fairer than it was fresh from the factory!

 

I haven't seen this transom all one color since I brought the boat up to Delran!

 

This poor boat had numerous close encounters with pilings and the like, to the point where some PO cut off a section of bow rail to effect a repair.  I took this off again to repair his repair and left it off for the painting.  By some odd coincidence this is the very section of rail that needs to be cut down to accommodate the anchor roller (as it's tradition for sailboats to have the primary anchor rode to starboard).  The whole nose has been redone with 'glass, Microlight, milled fibres, and endless sanding.  Now in the bright white Primekote it looks almost done.

The holes formerly occupied by the hull-mounted running lights will be fitted with teardrop-shaped black Plexiglas windows, giving light to the forepeak locker and finishing off the bow in a familiar way.  I'm putting little blue LED lights in here (called 'docking lights' on the breaker panel) to represent Diana's personality.

* * *

Diana's new stemhead fitting

I never liked the three-legged Hunter 25 pulpit and meant to replace it with something cooler from the very start.  This would mean cutting off the 7/8" stainless-steel stud from the stemhead fitting and polishing it over; but as Diana's PO had put her into some kind of close encounter with a piling, the original stemhead fitting was quite mangled and badly restraightened.  So I determined to make a new one.

I designed a very nice replacement part for this but found no one to make it at a reasonable price.  Then I happened to stumble across one on the Racelite web page and ordered it.  Though the dimensions on the site represented an adequate part, the actual thing seemed to represent them only nominally-- the thickness was not a true 1/8" and the length was entirely too short.  Rather typically I sat on this problem for over a year, working on other things, while I contemplated some solution.

Finally I ordered some flat stock, cut it to length, and sent it out to the local welders' with a pattern of the correct angle.  The part I received was simply beautiful.  I have begun to polish it and will finish it off before it's permanently installed.

 

You can see how the original part was only about 60 percent as long as it needed to be along the stem.  The flat stock welded to the part effectively doubles the thickness for the first three holes.  It is true that the tang for the forestay is still of the thin (original) stock; but as it's already thicker than were the shroud tangs I'll install it as it is and see if, as the rig is tuned, I get any elongation of the hole.  If that will be the case (which I doubt) I'll have it remedied with more welding.  As this Racelite part is meant for 20-to'22-footers, and as it's already meant to carry the load of 1/4" clevis pins, I'm betting it won't ever be a problem.

 

In this pic I have set the part on the bow to check the fit.  Thanks to my template the welder's work resulted in a perfect fit. You will see the gap behind the very top of the fitting-- this requires attention.  If I were to mount this as-is, two things would happen: Diana's J measurement (foot of the headsail) would be longer than that of a stock Hunter 25 by about 7/8"; and the natural stresses of a tuned and ruggedly-used rig would attempt to bend the fitting aftwards, putting the single screw through the deck into a shear load, and some distortion would occur.  This is why it is never wise to suspend rigging attachments over air, as would be done here.  I will fabricate a little block for in this gap, just something to support the compression load, and 'glass or epoxy it into place prior to paint and prior to attaching this fitting.

The horizontal pencil lines are marking where the mounting holes will go.  Only one of the original holes lined up.  I have a mahogany backing block for this, to be bedded in 5200 inside, and will drill new holes for the 1/4-20 hex-head cap screws.  Hex-heads are best for this sort of thing because you can put a ratchet and socket on each one and really tune them well.  Large-scale Phillips and, worse, slotted-head screws are really kind of pointless after a while.  A larger screw implies a larger load which means installation torque matters more.  No one can apply appropriate torque with a screwdriver handle.  I think the only reason people dislike hex-headed cap screws is because they make the boat look like Frankenstein's monster.  Personally, I like the look.  It's its own aesthetic.

The evident damage to the bow was from the PO.  The starboard-side toerail was cut to facilitate the fiberglass repair and reattached.  Coincidentally, this piece will have to be cut down to accommodate the anchor roller.  I'll fill the seam in the toerail with black 4000-UV to minimize the appearance of a crack.  Much of the old fiberglass repair was faired over with 3M filler (the grayer stuff).  The darker brown-olive is raw fiberglass from my sanding.  I have filled all the imperfections with both Evercoat 27 and epoxy and after painting with epoxy paint (Perfection or Brightside) this won't be visible or vulnerable.

The brown thing above the deck is the work-order tag from the welders'.  Mistakenly they wrote it up as being for my cousin Dave's shop; but this was my project and I contracted and paid for it.  (This happens a lot, actually.)

Sales pitch #1

If any other H25 owner is interested in having one of these parts, I will be happy to supply it.  It does, however, require a 4-legged pulpit; though I'd consider that an improvement.  I've designed an updated bow rail for Diana, along the lines of a J27's, complete with step-through end, varnished-mahogany seat/step with nonskid, and mount for Aqua Signal running light; though I'll be installing a plain-Jane castoff pulpit from another boat for the short term.

Sales pitch #2

Yes; the boat beside Diana, evident in one of these pics, is one of her sisters-- in this case a fellow February 1974 boat, this one the later trunk cabin/pop-top model.  They are both of the same series, Diana being number 027 and the other boat being 140.  At that time Hunter had two production lines of H25s at their Marlboro, New Jersey, plant; and I believe that the "0" signified the period's production series of "blister-canopy" or "flush-deck" models and the "1" signified the trunk-cabin models. If these boats were not on the production floor at the same time, they are probably not more than two weeks apart in age.

I have been referring to this other boat as "the sweet sister" and  hope to enter negotiations with her owner to take over her care and to restore her-- for she is still, even with an inadequate cover, in better condition than Diana was when I first found her and would represent a pretty easy, quick and profitable "quick fix" and resale.  She'll need some deck-core repair, paint, new cushions and upholstery, lifelines and probably cordage; and I do not know if there is an engine available.  But it wouldn't take much more than that for her to go sailing again.  As soon as Diana goes in I will have this boat shrink-wrapped and set a dehumidifier in her, to help preserve her.  Anyone interested is welcome to get in touch.

* * *

Bare-bottomed girl

I suppose this really should read 'bare-bottomed lady', as she is 38 years old; but it got attention.

This status is the product of about 2 seasons of scraping and sanding (with everything else I have to do).  I began using Stryp-Eaze but I had a very bad scraper and made little progress.  I changed to Pettit's Bio-Blast, which I found did not respond to following the directions as they were given.  It's supposed to stay on 15-25 minutes without drying; but I found that on a moderately-warm day, not even hot, it went from gel to utter varnish in much less time than that.  The best tactic was to apply it, using a brush from a cup, wait about 5 minutes and then go at it.  I got a really good deal on a scraper-- with two sets of blades-- at Harbor Freight for $2.99.  No complaints at all with this-- it worked great; but I did rotate the 4-sided blade several times before sharpening it as it did jam up pretty quickly.

I also found that the chemical stripper, having to soak into the paint in order to work well, does not work overhead!  On surfaces that were more on the bottom than on the sides, apparently the stripper merely hung on the paint, softening the very outer layer but doing little else.  So all of the bottom (read that: hardest-to-work-with) places were done mechanically, with 'Dusty' the orbital sander, 50-grit discs and hard work.

Here is a pic from earlier in the season which shows the very bottom layer of paint.  There were, apparently, three layers, all of old-school hard-shell antifouling.  This one was, of course, hardest to remove.  The chemical stripper did not permeate this paint, no matter how many times it was reapplied-- the greenish places are dried Bio-Blast which did not cut it.  For the most part it came off with the orbital sander (which meant that, for the most part, I wore my work home).

(May-Be is my cousin Mike's Capri 26 which was sold in the middle of this summer and relocated to its new home in New York.  This freed up plenty of room to work on mine!)

The black stripe came off well; apparently it was just standard enamel and the stripper ate it easily.  It was always too small and I will be redoing it completely more in keeping with the lines of the boat.


I am sure to have more on this later; but here I will add a reminder that the boottop stripe always has sheer, in both top and bottom edges.  Nothing looks worse than a perfectly-straight boottop, like how this one was.  The top, of course, reflects the sheerline of the boat.  The bottom edge does too; but much less conspicuously. For a boat of this size the bow end might be 2-1/2" above the actual floating waterline, the middle about 1-1/2" and the stern about 2" (I'll post my actual dimensions when I have worked them out). The bottom paint is exposed to the stripe (there should be NO hull color showing, ever).  Without getting too metaphysical you might think of the revealed bottom paint as that thin line of not-yet tanned skin that the woman shows just beyond her swimsuit at the beach.  It looks like vulnerability (a boat at rest should never show her bottom paint to strangers!) but it also indicates strength and hardiness, that she can and will endure whatever these elements hand out.  No one admires a boat that looks like it can barely stay afloat!

This view shows (albeit only slightly) some of the patching I did to the bottom.  The old through-hulls were removed and filled (the two larger circles below and beyond the stand pad).  Below them are seen the new through-hulls, which my daughter helped me install (it's always a two-person job).  The forward one is for the old SR Mariner speedometer-- I got a new fitting from them and almost too late realised it had to be aligned fore-and-aft to ensure the paddlewheel works properly.  I had expected the alignment was done by the paddlewheel itself.

I have since faired the very top of the keel in front-- it looks awfully big here but it's not really.


The other blotches are places where the gelcoat was chipped, not from blistering but just from age.  I filled these using Microlight most of the time, just whenever I had some extra from fairing the deck or keel blade.  This is not the best stuff to use under the waterline; as the filling compound will soak up water; but this bottom will all be sealed in barrier-coat epoxy and so it'll survive just fine.

I also mean to carry the barrier coating up above the waterline in some places, merely to seal some cracks there; so as yet there is no paint-to line or masking involved.

It is important to note that these ancient-gelcoat cracks are not moisture blisters.  One task I had long feared to attempt was to get moisture readings on this hull; but Jerry was checking his C44 in the yard and I borrowed the meter for Diana.  Being so long out of the water it now reads a very respectable 6 and below (out of 22) just about everywhere.  The place along the port side of the keel, where I had detected some delamination and then repaired, now reads under 10.  This might even account for standing bilge water.  The starboard side, however, reads about 16 which is alarming.  I will probe this from inside when I get the chance (before barrier coat) but it may reflect bilge water as well.

(The rudder reads well over 22-- with loud pinging from the detector meter! --which I will address in another place.)

Poor Diana, of course, is understandably embarrassed to be laid so bare and undignified before strangers' eyes.  I told her she has nothing to worry about, that at least it's a very good-looking bottom; but she was very prompt, as soon as I had taken these photos, to rap me in the head with a bit of stray line and then to lash out at my leg as I vaulted out of the hatch--

By the way this still hurts (wearing long pants is like sanding it with 80 grit all day); and I have promised the boat to get the barrier coat on as soon as possible.  At least then she'll be in her pewter-gray underwear, not a bad look for any hull.

* * *

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).

* * *