Friday, December 30, 2005

Rudder and more bulkhead work:

December 25

Merry Christmas! We took the morning off and went for a bicycle ride with friends.
Heather removed all the hardware from the boom and stripped the paint a couple weeks ago. It’s in good shape and all the hardware came off e are aluminum. The spreaders are just sections of aluminum tubing with a plug in each end. We'll probably replace them, since the old ones are badly corroded.

We had a nasty cold snap (as low as 13degrees F) so Corey decided it was time to work on the rudder because most of that could be done inside. He made a sanding board and used it to attack the remaining bits of bottom paint with 36grit sandpaper, and realized the surface was far from fair.

The foot was gouged all the way into the foam core at the leading edge from some sort of impact, and there were a few spots delaminating along the trailing edge. The gel coat was discolored and cracked at the shaft.


Corey ground away all the damaged area and feathered the edges with a die grinder and a disc sander, then filled them in with a mixture of MAS Flag resin, cab-o-sil, and micro balloons, and filled in the low spots on the surface. When it was hard enough to sand, he faired the whole thing with 36grit paper on the sanding board, then added more fairing compound to the remaining low spots and sanded again with 80grit paper. He also, almost as an afterthought, put one layer of 6oz fiberglass cloth down the leading edge and along the foot, as well as four layers around the shaft. The whole thing was coated with unthickened MAS resin. Unfortunately the finish was horrible. Forty-five degrees is enough for bonding and fairing, but it doesn’t do it for clear coat. According to MAS’ own literature, the temperature should be at least 65 degrees for clear coating. Turning up the heat for subsequent coats helped a lot.

Today (Hey, I’m up to the present!!!!) we began glassing in the bulkheads. We had already glued them in place with Flag resin, thickened with wood flour and cab-o-sil. Made up some more of the same mixture and formed it into large fillets at the edge of the bulkheads. Joel Mill suggests on his website that the glass be laid down while the fillets are still soft, this is excellent advice because it means that any imperfections in the fillet can be smoothed out through the glass, and that the surface of the fillet will conform to the texture of the glass. We used one layer of biax and followed it with two layers of 6oz tooling cloth.

We wet out the two layers of tooling cloth together on a piece of cardboard and put them on at the same time, which was a little bit of a problem. Up to now, we have only used medium hardener with our resin because it hasn’t been very warm. The tooling cloth is harder to smooth out than the biax, and we used wider pieces, which made the problem worse. Corey was extremely frustrated and afraid he would have to remove the tooling cloth layers and start over, as was Heather, although she seemed to be in much better humor than Corey… Anyway, we succeeded in getting the laminate to lie down. In the future we will use the slow hardener for this operation and things should go a little better.

Bulkheads and mast step:

December 1
Well, records are a little shaky, but during the last couple months we have made a fair bit of progress.

The bulkheads in place when we took possession of the boat were made of low quality half-inch plywood and painted with some kind of yucky sticky white paint. They were glassed in very poorly too. No fillets were under the glass where it goes from bulkhead to hull. Since the bulkheads hold the chainplates, and thus, keep the mast from coming down, we decided to replace them.

Originally there was an oak stringer glassed into the core of the cabin top, parallel with the bulkheads, which served as a step for the mast. When the bulkheads were replaced last time, whoever did it cut away most of the glass holding in the mast step. Then they attached the bulkheads to it with a screw (one!) on each side, and a single layer of 6oz fiberglass cloth.

When we got a chisel under the edge of the glass, which was ostensibly holding in the bulkheads, we could peel it up like masking tape. A couple of swift kicks and the old bulkheads were history. The old mast step was a little more robust, so Corey attacked it with a mallet and a chisel.

Then began several hours of grinding with a monster 7” Milwaukee disc grinder and 36-grit sandpaper to prepare for new bulkheads and mast step.

Here is a shot of the new bulkheads, and mast step fitted, but not yet glued in. The brace in the middle is temporary...

We settled on a 3/4-inch plywood, nine ply plus mahogany veneer, for the new bulkheads. Corey found a piece of mahogany to use for the new mast step. The new mast step is three inches thick (fore/aft) by almost five inches deep under the mast, tapering out to just under three at the windows. It is slotted to receive the bulkheads.

Here is a side view showing how the bulkhead is slotted into the mast step.

Our resin and fiberglass arrived a couple days ago. While we were in France Bruce Schwab exposed us to MAS epoxies and after talking with Joel Mill of Devlin boatbuilding up at the wooden boat show in Port Townsend, we decided to go with it. Joel runs a website called boatbuilder.org where he sells MAS products at a significant discount, and has posted lots of advice about using it. The glass came from Fiberglass Supply in Bingen, Washington. Corey saw an ad for them in the back of Good Old Boat magazine, in addition to stumbling across them online. They were easy to deal with over the phone and are only one day away by UPS Ground.

We also got our keel back a couple days ago. We could have sandblasted it here, but it would have been a lot of work, so we took it to a place in Centralia. While it was there, we had them powdercoat it. It still needs quite a bit of filling and fairing before it can be reglassed because the casting is quite rough. Epoxy should stick to the powdercoat alright, the powdercoat provides an extra layer of corrosion protection for the steel keel, and it also means that we didn’t have to immediately epoxy it when we got it back from sandblasting.

Corey was sick for a few days so he sat down and spent some quality time with Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design and calculated the loads on the standing rigging to see what size wire we will need to use for the shrouds and stays. Maybe he’ll post the calculations later, maybe not. The shrouds and stays will be 5/32” stainless wire, which gives a safety factor of 2.8.

He also decided to make new chainplates because all the holes are oversize in the old ones. The new ones will be held to the bulkheads with five 5/16 bolts, which provides for about 200 pounds more strength than the shrouds.

Bottom Paint Removal:

June 8
Scraping the bottom paint proved futile. After trying to scrape it, we were seduced by West Marine safety strip which sounded much nicer than grinding.

June 18
Did a test patch with the safety strip. It seems to take off the first layer ok, and then it dries out. Should we cover it with plastic and let it steep a little longer? Removed the winches while we were thinking of things to do. They are very classic and should polish up nicely. They need backing plates, and were mounted with mismatched bolts.

July 28
Have admitted defeat with the stripper and resorted to grinding. Corey’s friend and former housemate Scotty loaned us his Makita dustless grinder and Corey is lying under the boat, grinding away in slow agony, wishing he was almost anywhere else, doing almost anything else. Heather is chipping all the old glass of the keel, which she doesn’t like too much, but Corey is jealous…

Removing the motor mount and rudder:

June 2
Removed the motor mount today. The plywood between the mount and the transom never had any kind of finish put on it as far as I can tell. There was another piece of plywood on the inside of the transom, presumably to spread the bolt stresses a bit, but the bolts were recessed into the plywood so far that it did not serve this purpose at all. A set of holes from a previous motor mount was not properly filled. The mount itself is in good shape and decent quality. When I get it all apart, we’ll send it out to be powder coated.

Corey also kicked the cradle out from under the bow of the boat and lowered it while raising the stern so he could remove the rudder. The rudder post is a one-inch stainless steel shaft and it turns in a copper tube glassed into the hull with no bearings or packing at all. The copper is worn and needs replacement, we’ll probably do the same thing because it is simple, and after all, it’s lasted since 1965!

Monday, December 26, 2005

Removing the Keel:

May 31
We’ve been doing loads of research on the Internet regarding bottom paint, gelcoat and general restoration. We were hoping to save the gelcoat but the crazing is too widespread and it seems to be very thin in places so I think we are settled on painting the whole boat.

We are lucky to be endowed with a very well stocked garage, courtesy Corey’s dad Steve. We have air tools, power tools, hand tools, and loads of supplies. A fabulous person we met in France, another Steve, owns a large marina and has also provided us with great advice and the offer of a motor. We are going to plan a trip down to California to see him and visit a fabulous rigger Jason Winkle, whom we also met in France. We want to suck information out of him too.

Since the keel is steel, we found where it meets the hull with a magnet and ground through the glass there in preparation for dropping the keel. Then we removed the keel bolts, which were made of threaded rod and very corroded. When the bolts were out we hoisted the boat so the keel was a couple inches off the ground and gave the keel a good solid thump with a block of wood and a ten-pound sledgehammer. It groaned and then dropped to the ground with a nice thump. We carefully tipped the keel onto a little dolly and rolled it outside.

Projected Project List:


Only Two Major Structural Issues That We Are Aware Of Now:

1. The keel seems to have a slight list and the keel bolts need replacement. We will remove and re-bed the keel and replace the bolts.

2. Over time the pressure of the mast has caused the top of the cabin to sag a bit, so the reinforcing stringer inside will have to be strengthened or replaced.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Pandora's Box Opened....


Around July of 2004 I heard an ad on the KAOS radio community billboard advertising a “free boat, you haul”. Being a free stuff addict I decided to investigate. What I found was Columbia 22 in sound condition. I asked Steve, a shipwright, and Steve, a captain, to come and check out this boat to determine if there were any insurmountable problems. Both Steves declared her sound and a great deal for the price. $0

Steve, the shipwright, also happens to be Corey's father. How convenient. He has lived and worked in this area for a long time and through his connections we were able to get a boom truck to lift the boat onto a trailer. The cradle situation was precarious and riding in another vehicle I clutched the dash white knuckled as the boat swung a little to each side and pogoed a bit on every bump. Happily we made it to Tenino, visions of the boat falling into a ditch nearly giving me heart failure along the way.

Corey and I were on the verge of leaving for France to pursue teaching positions. We would also end up working on the OceanPlanet during the Vendée Globe, which gave us some information, skills and contacts, which we are using on our project.

So the boat lived, suspended from the rafters until our return. Work has progressed on it since we returned, somewhat slowly, but very surely.