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Deck touches hull!

I had promised myself that I would only have the deck in my car bay for a week - that I could get all the protection patches completed in a week. In the event, it took three. So it goes.

This week, I started out by putting an additional layer of 1” e-glass tape on all the 6-32 nuts. I figure this is a small precaution to take vs. trying to fix one of these after the fact. It does seem to help, they are more tightly fixed in place.

I also glassed the second centre bevel block, installed more tape, and then drilled the holes for the 6-32 bolts with the nifty triangle bit on the Dremel tool.

Once that was done, I was pretty much ready to get everything together. I rearranged, moved the deck, placed the cradle, lowered the hull, and placed the deck. Whoohoo! Once that was done, I hooked the deck up to the roof pulley system. I had to do some slight repositioning of the stand to ensure I could just pull straight up and down, but (luckily) it worked out well, and I don't have to push the deck around much to get it into position.

A note on the stand - it's four 60” 2x4's (cull from the Orange Borg), with scrap 5/8” plywood nailed on to the ends. The large end is 40x23, the small end 37x19 (these were mostly chosen as a result of the scrap I had lying around). I nailed another 6” wide scrap of plywood diagonally across the bottom two 2x4's to provide some stability. The cradle sits on the top 2x4s, and is held in place by a couple of 2x3s (a cut-in-half 2x6). Seems stable so far.

The first bit of fitting I did was on one of the backing blocks for the trapeze cord; it needed around 1/8” shaved off in order to fit behind the block on the transom. Trusty Dremel to the rescue.

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Protection patches, continued

I completed the second round of protection patches this week. I scraped up the backing plates for the traveller bar - there was some overhang involved here, so the Dremel was particularly helpful. (The Dremel tool I bought on impulse, but it's been really helpful in getting into tight spots...) Once everything was scraped up, I applied liberal amounts of epoxy/404 so the s-glass wouldn't have to go around a tight corner.

I bought a small triangular bit for the Dremel and used that to drill through all the s-glass I had installed so the bolts could go through.

One of the two rectangular backing plates I didn't install nuts on. So I drilled out a hole for the nut, in preparation for the epoxy/404. While filling in the traveller bar backing plate, I also bonded the nuts in place and filled in the areas around the nuts so the protection patches will fit nicely.

Once everything was cured, I sanded it all down, and went back and applied a layer of s-glass to the rectangular blocks. Once I covered it with epoxy, I put a sheet of plastic and a layer of foam over it, then applied pressure. This worked fairly well - down in the valleys there's a couple spots where the glass didn't touch the backing block, but overall it held quite well.

I also went back and filled in a couple holes I drilled adjacent to the real hole in one of the blocks - the drill slipped.

I have to say, the small 6-32 bolts are supremely annoying, particularly the cleat bevel blocks. If the bolts pull out or the nuts fall off, I'll be unhappy. Part of this is because I can't figure out how I would replace the nut, or how I would bond a wood screw into the same hole the machine screw went into. I've broken a whole string of these 2 1/2” long 6-32 bolts; they are really easy to torque the heads off of. And I wonder if they'll be the best solution for the problem. Christian suggested through-bolting them; but what a hassle.

I also finally figured out how to best apply grease to a bolt. You squirt some grease onto a plastic sheet, then roll the bolt in it lengthwise until the grease is evenly applied. This works really well - no wiping off excess and then reapplying, it produces an even application.

Finally, the only thing I wondered about while putting all these patches on was this. In many spots the tee-nut was pounded into the backing plate, and there was no excess epoxy which sqeezed out around the edge. This means that there's a sharp transition from edge of tee-nut to backing plate. When this happened, the protection patch couldn't bond to anything right at the edge of the tee-nut. It may have been worth going back and adding in a little extra epoxy around the edges of the tee-nuts, just to be sure the patch had plenty of surface area to stick to.

[Update 2008 Feb 25: Buying that triagular bit was exactly the wrong thing to do. The glass needs to stay in place, because water can seep in through the bolt holes and get into the inner air chamber. I may have to epoxy all my bolts in place to stop seepage.]

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Backing for bow fitting, protection patches for tee-nuts

Finally got to the point of flipping the deck back over. All the holes are drilled and backing blocks in place, now all that's left is to install the backing for the bow fitting, and put "protection patches" of s-glass under the tee-nuts. These patches should stop the tee-nuts from popping out (which would be a real disaster - there's no hope of getting in there to fix the problem...)

So, I flipped the deck back over and checked everything out - generally looks pretty good. I sanded down all the backing blocks. There were a couple 6-32 square nuts which needed to be re-seated, so I started working on the backing for the bow fitting.

This backing is two layers of s-glass/hybrid, plus a whole bunch of epoxy/high density filler. It takes maybe 10 squirts to fill it all in. Because it's so far forward, I sheared off the leading edges of the backing plates (and I'll have to remove more, it doesn't mesh nicely with the hull). To ensure the backing block was level, I put a level on the main part of the deck, and then a small level on these backing blocks, and made sure they levelled out as well.

Once that was complete, I cut the backing pieces. I screwed each screw into its tee-nut so it was flush with the bottom of the tee-nut. There were a couple exceptions - the pole ring saddle bolts, the spin block backing piece. Here, I don't expect to have to remove these, so I just cut small holes in the glass at the right spots and slipped it over the bolts. Then, with the screws all in place, I went around with a syringe of grease and filled in the areas between the bolt and the nut, to ensure extra epoxy didn't pool there and stop the bolt from going through once everything is cured.

Then, just paint all the glass with epoxy, and sand the excess off once cured.

[Update 2006 Aug 20: I learnt later that any big hunk of epoxy and filler like this is usually better if it includes a bunch of cut up s-glass as well. The s-glass adds additional strength to the mixture.]

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My screw collection

Because most of the screws I've used I've had to order (they're all stainless, and I wanted to use square drive where I could), I've got a pretty complete list of screws I used to hold everything together. Herewith, a list: