Waterline stripe

I've been getting frustrated that the progress I have been making on this boat does not look like progress; so I reached a limit recently and opened the can of Pettit Protect I've had for over a year and just went for it.  I cannot say this is a perfect job; there are minor spots in the hull I really should have faired better or filled better, and of course the first roller cover broke down after two coats and for the third I had to dig into my horde of stores for another which was too nappy and not as good.  But the paint's on the boat and that's good enough. 
   
I chose the Pettit Protect over Interlux Interprotect for one solid reason.  To reach the desired thickness, Interprotect requires five coats where as Pettit Protect requires only three.  It goes on thicker.  Therefore I accomplished this with only one roller replacement and in only about three hours of a hot Saturday in August.  
   
The rugged outline of the top edge of paint wants explanation.  In filling and fairing the hull's numerous cracks, I encountered quite a few of what I determined were 'bottom-style' cracks above the designed waterline, especially in the bow.  These are typical of any boat; and for a sailboat that one must conclude will be heeling more often than not, under way, the imposed delineation of a waterline is pretty arbitrary.  So I prepared these places as I would for any 'underwater' area; and once the waterline is established the gray can be sanded down above the line to accept topsides paint.   
  

The black Sharpie lines, applied at the upper edge of the green-tape stripe, will represent the lower edge of the painted stripe(s).  Thus I am 'cheating' the original waterline up about two inches.  

I lowered the rudder in its shaft tube but without digging a hole I was unable to remove it entirely.  As of this picture it has been sealed and re-'glassed (the yellowish stuff is epoxy, with some Microlight filler).  I found every seam in the rudder shell to have been open and filled with bottom paint (not a good sign), which was responsible for the whole thing being saturated in water.  As I used up all the Pettit Protect on the hull, I will have to buy more for the rudder and the stand squares.
   
From earlier photos one can see that I stripped the entire hull bare-- leaving no stripes.  Earlier I had plotted all three lines-- float waterline, designed waterline, and top of bootstripe-- and recorded the measurements.  These current lines come from those plots.
   

 

This sort-of-closeup view shows my 25-foot Stanley tape clamped along the toerail of the boat.  Using this as a kind of number line, I dangled the other Stanley tape from this, at prescribed intervals, taking 'soundings' down along the hull to the stripe.  To get the waterline back onto the hull, I had only to read my numbers back and to plot the marks from them.  
  
I am not sure I'm happy with the replotted marks.  Though I did the plotting accurately, I fear the boat is going to be too heavy, especially forward, and especially to starboard, which worries me.  To starboard are the engine-starting battery, the galley, the toilet itself, the toolbox, the primary anchor and (short) chain rode, and the microwave oven as well as the skipper's usual sitting area below, where the computer and stereo are located.  Everything else is more of less balanced out by a complement to the other side.  For now I shall let these lines alone and count on shifting some weight about (possibly by storing all canned goods to port, for example).   
   
In the background Jerry's 1980 C44 can be seen.  Jerry's a liveaboard who's been doing a heroic job stripping bad 'glass from his boat's bottom and re-'glassing the whole thing.  His stamina and indefatigable fortitude are an inspiration.
  

  
After taking some of these pics I just had to snap this view of Diana's underside all recently done in pewter gray undercoater (Pettit Protect).  
  
Yes; the keel looks a little bent out of shape.  Believe me-- it was much worse before I got my hands on it.
   
The paint does look a little blotchy in this view.  Maybe it's glare.  I can vouch for the effort than went into smoothing this; and the result really is pretty good.  Undoubtedly it's better than it was when new.  
  
The little oval block affixed to the bottom, aft of the keel, is the fairing block I made for the bronze drain plug.  Maybe it's just overkill; but, then again, every girl can use a little help....  
 
  

* * * 

Where have you been, naughty girl?

Once upon a time, my uncle and aunt got a dog from a New York pound and discovered that at some point in his former life Bruno had been taught to stand on his hind legs and walk about.  It was eerie to see because we had no idea of how he had come to learn that; and of course Bruno had no way of telling us.  The knowledge added a mysterious sort of depth to his personality that, in part, helped make him a most interesting and entertaining little guy.


As I was stripping the bottom of Diana I uncovered (literally) this.

It's a patch in the hull, not badly done (though it could have been better faired), apparently from when something holed the boat.  I imagine it may have been some ugly metal angle-iron or something poking up along a bulkhead when the boat rode there during a tidal or storm surge.  For a fin-keeled boat to sustain a hull holing in a location like this-- under the quarter berth-- for any other reason suggests some kind of funny business.  Any puncture from sharp impact afloat would have occurred forward of the keel; right?

My fear is that the boat was allowed to lie over on her side, which could (but not conclusively) account for a hole here as well as the PO's having had to rebed the keel, since that is how a fin-keeled boat sustains damage when it goes aground.  But the keel has been fixed (by me), the rest of the hull is sound, and so there is really no way of knowing at this point.  It's like undressing your lover and discovering a scar from an injury or some surgery-- it begs a question; but at least in that case you could expect some sort of answer to either set you at-ease or put you off trusting her, if only for the present.


And so this shall remain as a mystery, documented in my (very poor) photos and very soon to be covered over for ever by the epoxy barrier coating, a piece of Diana's past that she is unwilling or unable to tell me about and which inevitably, however unfortunately, imparts at least some little skepticism as to her former reputation. 


* * *

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.

* * *