My work away from work this spring took place at the marina where I was involved in a lot of hand numbing scraping and sanding. The main objective was to replace two cockpit seacock support plates that had literally turned into potting mulch. I also wanted to fix what looked like minor deficiencies in the exterior of hull below the waterline.
So I climbed under the cockpit into a cramped and uncomfortable position where I started by removing the old wood plates from under the seacocks. This was easy since the wood had deteriorated into mulch like material. This allowed me to pick off pieces with my fingers until the seacocks were free floating. Unexpectedly the next step turned into what felt like an impossible task. Im of course talking about removing the old drain pipes from the seacock fittings. The fittings over the years had cut slits inside the pipe from perhaps the engine vibrations making them impossible to pull off. The limited access and angle of attack didnt make the job any easier. After a couple good hours I finally managed to leaver the pipes loose. In retrospect if I were doing this now, I would have used my new heat gun to soften the end of the pipe. After removing the seacocks i sanded down the uneven surface left by the old glue. I cut out same sized plywood plates and fitted. The starboard plate became a challenge as the hole was not drilled entirely parallel to the interior surface. The plate th
ickness at centre was 5/8" while on one edge it had gone down to 1/8". My intention was to replace the plates with fibreglass plates and sanding it would not have been an option. so i created a mold from which i made a perfect fitting plate for the seacock. Since one edge was only 1/8" I had doubled the starboard plate with another piece of fibreglass to add rigidity. With this done I was ready to start exterior work.
Unfortunately the frequency of bad weather early on had caused many d
elays with the exterior resulting with a rescheduling of my launch date by two weeks. I wanted to eliminate spider cracks that started reaching fibreglass and a nasty looking crack along what I thought was the keel/hull joint and other small things I saw. After a lot of sanding through the layers and layers of fairing it turned out there was nothing but good looking fibreglass under. No lead. I didnt have time to ponder this so i continued with all the other sanding. Eventually I got to an area at the front of the keel about 5 inches down from the h
ull. The area looked like it had sustained a light impact. Probably a log. The filler was saturated with water and had actually turned green. Sanding through it revealed the keel joint. Having a close look at the area I found a 20" long and 8" deep delamination running along the keep joint down the lead keel on either side.
It was too much to sand out so I sounded and marked the boarder of what was loose. Then i cut along the boarder with a dremel down to the depth of the lead and simply peeled off the loose fibreglass in one piece. Water must have entered through the damaged area, then soaked along the keel joint. This caused oxidation and expansion in the winter resulting with this unexpected problem.
Well with everything sanded down my next step was to apply a virgin coat of epoxy over the areas that would be receiving filler or fibreglass cloth. This was definitely the fun part of the project. For filler I was using west systems fast epoxy along with cylica and micro fibre mixtures. At this point I have also installed the seacock through hulls. I should have taped the outside along with the through hull so the Sikaflex I used would have been easier to clean up. I let it dry first before i cut the excess off. I didnt want to contaminate the surface with too much of the silicone inside the Sikaflex.
A little sanding and it was time to paint. First came a couple coats of VCtar barrier coat followed by a couple layers of VC17 anti fouling. Well I hope it all holds up. So far the yacht has been in water for over a month and the vc17 has not changed colour. :-)
