Refurbishment

On his website Charles Stock wrote a number of articles and I was reminded of one of these as I removed the last of the antifouling from Shoal Waters’ hull. In the article entitled ‘The penalty-for-careless‘ Charles describes how in the September of 1989, having passed under the bridge at Havengore Creek, Charles and his wife Joy anchored for the night. Sometime during that night Shoal Waters sat back on her anchor. This is what he had to say in an article published February 1990 issue of Practical Boat Owner:

Hours later in warm morning sunshine I put on my water boots and dropped over the side for a walk. Where was the anchor? A few steps to port showed the end of the stock peeping out from under the bilge. My heart sank as I plodded round to starboard and peered under the hull behind the mast to see one fluke pressed hard against the skin of the boat. With a home made paddle serving as a spade, I quickly dug down to the crown of the anchor and then the lower fluke. A firm push drove it down into the mud drawing the top fluke clear of the hull. I reached under the bilge to find a `little finger’, sized dimple. Back on board, we removed my bunk cushions and boards to reach the bilge. Any damage should be under the inside lead ballast but once that was lifted, none was visible. I have glued two narrow strips of wood to the inside of the hull to carry the ballast rather than let it sit directly on the half inch hot moulded skin of the hull. Could the fluke have met the hull directly under one of them?

Well, I found that ‘little finger’ sized dimple in the hull. Still there after 37 years.

The Plastic Padding used to fill the dimple has long since fallen out, but here is the evidence of that mishap.

It is not much when compared to these two scratches. The two scratches are quite major. I spent some time cleaning out the lower one but passed on the upper one for the moment and will do that when I go around the hull getting the filler out of all the other scratches.

But I did finish the removal of the antifouling paint which all-in-all has taken just two days.

I had to adopt a two-handed technique for this side of the hull since my arms and right wrist were still aching from scraping the other side. This involves heating the area to be scraped with the hot air gun for a few seconds, then scraping along the hull holding the handle of the scraper in my left hand and pressing down on the blade with my right. I found that I needed far less heating this way, hardly any at all in fact, and the finish was a lot cleaner than the first side.

Now that this is done, I can make a start on the topside paint which should be fairly easy of the first side is anything to go by, and I’ll start at the bows and work my way aft. Starting with the larger area and working towards the smaller.

Time for a cup of tea.

I made an early start on the hull this morning, after feeding the animals and before breakfast, although that could also be classed as feeding the animals, but I digress.

I decided to start on the middle section between the bilge runner and the keel since this was the area on the other side that I found most difficult to work on due to the stretch.

Imagine my surprise when I found this. It is the pointed tip of a screw. On the inside there are two reinforcing battens about half an inch thick and two and a half inches wide and as long as the bilge runner. These were screwed, and presumably glued, into place from the inside. Either the batten in this area was a little thinner than the rest of the screw a little longer or the countersink bored to recess the screw head was a little too deep and the point has just protruded from the hull.

I’ve hightlighted the visible parts of these reinforcing battens in the photo above.

A little bit further on I found another one, only this one protrudes a lot further. The first one I found can be left alone, it only just sticks out and the sanding will probably make it flush with the hull, but this one requires some attention to make it level with the hull.

I managed to get the strip next to the bilge runner done, the hardest part as the runner gets in the way of the scraper, and a section about a foot wide at the front.

Time for a cup of tea.

And breakfast.

I scraped more at lunchtime and then again ager work and found a few more surprises.

Firstly a gripfast nail that I think was supposed to go into the bilge runner and missed.

The another doing the same thing. In both cases the nails were covered in filler. I’ll cut these two short rather than leave them proud.

One of the scratches on this side of the hull appears to have been filler with putty It certainly fill the scratches well and required some effort to get it out.

Time for a cup of tea.

I didn’t do any scraping over the weekend, instead I continued the transom work and gave myself a chance to stop aching.

The laminated plywood for the repair came out very well and I was able to hold it against the hull and draw the outside of the hull on one edge.

I used panel pins on the rough line and a very flexible batten to fair the curve which you can see about 2.5mm away from the rough line.

I heavily scored the line with a sharp knife to keep tear out to a minimum. It’s not really needed where the cut is in the same direction as the grain.

But it is very necessary where the cut is across the grain.

A few minutes work with the jigsaw and the shape was cut.

I kept the cut just outside the cut line, deliberately, so there were a few fuzzies but not on the good side of the cut.

The patch was then screwed over the hole with the cut edge aligned with the hull.

It’s not so easy to see in a photo, but the edge of the patch does not follow the shape of the hull.

I used a sanding disc on an angle grinder to fair the patch to the curve of the hull as you can see here. It was a bit tricky since I had to avoid sanding any of the hull in the process.

This part got away from my a little…

…but most of the edge was good.

I trimmed the bottom of the path to the level of the aft deck, again by drawing on the patch along the deck and then sing that line to cut the excess away.

This is not the final fit since when it is fitted to the top of the hole, this bit will extend beyond the deck and will need to be cut down again. But it shortens the patch a bit making it easier to locate and handle.

Today’s job was to cold scrape as much of the antifouling paint off the starboard hull. This took around two hours this afternoon and in places quite a lot of the wood was exposed. There are also a few scratches as expected.

The area between the bilge runner and the keel did not scrape off so much of the antifoul, but that’s because it’s further way and thus a stretch. Still, good enough.

The aft section did not scrape away so much either and I may revisit this tomorrow afternoon.

This side showed more cracks between the laminates as seen here.

With a major scratch closer to the bows.

As well as cracks between the laminates. I’ll fill these with neat epoxy. The hull will be warmed first with the hot air gun, masking tape applied either side of the crack to limit the spillage, then the epoxy dripped into the cracks. The hot wood will thin the epoxy which will then flow deeper into the crack. Or so I hope. This will be carried out once the hull has been properly scraped off and sanded and at that time I’ll also fill in the more egregious scratches. That won’t be for a few days yet. Lots of scraping to do first.

Time for a cup of tea.

During the last week I managed to work on the scraping every day except Friday.

This was the state of the port hull on Wednesday morning, 07:05 to be precise…

… and this was the hull on Thursday afternoon with all of the paint, both topside and antifoul scraped off. I still have to sand the hull but for right now, I need to do a few other tasks and let my aching arms and hands recover bit.

The plan had been to do a strip of scraping and then another boat task, but in the end I just carried on with the scraping. Now it was time to do a few other boat things before starting on the other side.

Today I decided that the first boat tasks would be to make a start on the new skeg.

The piece of Cedar I bought was rough sawn both sides which meant that the first thing to do was to plane off the majority of the saw marks.

That didn’t take long. Notice that the end of the board has started to crack. My fault entirely, I should have painted the ends as soon as I received the board.

One edge had been cut square and it was a quick and easy job to cut off the live edge. I’m using a long, straight piece of metal as a fence extension to keep the board straight and a roller support to take the weight of the board at the start of the cut.

I used the cardboard template to mark the skeg on the board allowing just the width of the saw blade between the two pieces.

To make the angled cut I used hot glue to fix a piece of wood against the timber that will hold the board at the correct angle to make the cut.

Not much later I had two skeg-shaped pieces of timber.

Now it was just a case of glueing them together. The timber is pretty flat so I’ll just use cramps for this job.

I used Titebond III as the adhesive, I did think of using epoxy but decided that since the skeg is going to be sheathed in epoxy and fibreglass cloth and that Titebond III is a waterproof glue, there was no benefit to using the more expensive epoxy.

One question that I have been considering since I removed the rotten part of the transom, is whether the entire thing should be replaced. This would not be an easy job all due to the bevel that would need to be cut on the replacement transom. This would be a rolling bevel, meaning that it changes angle from one end to the other and it would also mean that the new transom would need to be inserted from the bottom when looking at the upside down hull.

I had cut back the transom until I reached good plywood so the question became how likely is it that the other side of the transom has suffered the same problem. It sounds good and the surveyor didn’t note any soft returns from that side of the plywood so the chances are that the rest of the transom is sound.

I looked closer at the corner of the boat the lower right as you look at it in the photos and I could see that part of the hull itself was a little rotten. On looking further I saw that this was not a big area of rot but I noticed that the hull to deck joint had cracked and that seems to be the point at which water had been getting in resulting in the degraded plywood. I wondered if that corner of the boat had hit something hard when being sailed which had cracked all the glue joints in that area. It would certainly would explain why just hta corner allowed water in.

I scraped away all of the soft timber that I could reach and applied penetrating epoxy using a brush and a syringe with a large bore blunt needle to “inject” the epoxy into the split joints and then coated the area around where the soft wood had been.

Time for a cup of tea.

Next task, once the glue on the new skeg had set up a bit, was to cut the bottom with a shallow vee-shape to fit the sloping keel.

Firstly I glued two mixing sticks together with hot glue, resting them on either side of the keel whilst the glue cooled. Then I measured the angle so that I can set the table saw. My handy-dandy protractor gave a 10º angle, so I set the blade to 85º and made two cuts.

The result was pretty good, as you can see.

Here is the skeg resting on the keel. It isn’t upright but I’ll trim that out during the fitting of the skeg. The bottom needs to be hollowed slightly since the keel is curved. Something for another day, methinks.

Time for a cup of tea.

Moving on I decided to prepare the plywood for the transom. The original plywood was 3/4″ thick, which is 19mm, or thereabouts. I don’t have any good plywood that thick and I don’t want to spend around £100 getting an 8′ x 4′ x 18mm sheet of Marine Plywood only to use a quarter of it. However, I do have 6mm Marine Plywood and I can laminate three layers of that to get 18mm, which will be close enough.

So, having cut the three pieces I set up the paraphernalia to vacuum clamp the three pieces together. Again, like the skeg and for the same reasons, I decided to use Titebond III. But before I could do that I had to clean out the pump on the top of the glue bottle as it has become blocked with old glue and would not pump glue any more.

That was a bit of a chore, but now I know how the pump works and how easy it is to clean it.

I used a 25mm thick piece of chipboard that had a smooth veneer on the surface as the base for the clamping. It was flat enough for this task. Then it was get everything cut and ready for the glue up. Once the glue had been applied and the laminates stacked, the netting was put on the top, then the plastic cover that already had the vacuum and gauge fittings fitted. I had laid out the butyl tape on the base board before starting to apply the glue, so it was just a case of remove the backing tape, press the plastic down on the tape and start the pump.

The pump is only pulling about 0.5 bar in the photo but I did go around after taking the shot to close up all the leaks and eventually get a vacuum of 0.95 bar, I let the pump run for an hour before stopping the pump and removing the various parts. Usually the glue sets up enough to be unclamped in around 20 minutes, so an hour was more than enough for this job.

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at shaping the plywood.

I really want to get the transom repaired before it is time to turn Shoal Waters the right way up so that the hull is not deformed in any way by the procedure due to the reinforcement of the transom. Preferably, I’d lie tp get it done before I start sheathing the hull as I want to sheath the transom up to the waterline to ensure that the hull to transom joint is strengthened and sealed.

For now, that is a good days’ work.

Time for a cup of tea.

I had said in my last post that there were a lot of scratches under the antifouling but that “None of the damage is deep, no more than a millimeter”.

I have to say that I was wrong about that.

This one, is nearly 5mm deep and since the hull is only 10mm thick, this once can be considered to be significant. This is one of the scratches photographed before, but after I had removed the filler.

These are not quite so deep but deeper that I had expected.

There is also patches of a black substance that looks like tar, but the paint has stuck to it, so I expect that it is not tar or bitumen. I’ve tried using various solvents, except Acetone as I don’t have any, and nothing shifts it. This patch here is after being sanded as well as the solvent tests.

I laos tried to use the belt sander on the hull but the surface is too uneven to allow it to work properly, so I went back to the orbital sander.

This is the progress to date. nThe section of antifouling between the bilge runner and the keel has been removed and I think that this is probably the hardest part of the job. Trying to scrape away the paint at a stretch is not easy on the muscles and I think that when I start the other side, I shall do this bit first.

Scraping progress has been slow this last week as I have been on my own for a week and that means looking after the horse. That in itself isn’t s problem except that the time I had been spending in the cool of the morning between getting up and starting work was now taken up with feeding duties and pooh picking. Frankly, most days it was too hot to do any significant scraping in the afternoon after work, hence the slow progress.

However, that all changes tomorrow and I will be able to get back to scraping first thing and progress should improve,

Now that I have quite a lot of the wood under the waterline exposed, I can see that some of the scraped line up. The one highlighted above shows one such line.

I wonder what I’ll find on the other side.

Time for a cup of tea.

Although the main task is to remove the antifouling and topside paint, there are a few other tasks that need to be done and I decided to use these to break up the paint stripping work which is quite physically, and therefore mentally, demanding.

So, I started on filling the aft part of the slot between the reinforcing timbers and the holes through the keel and hog.

And this is the first piece. Looks good, but takes a while to make since not only does it taper in width…

…it tapers from top to bottom as well.

I used some slightly thickened epoxy to glue the spline into the slot and used lead weights to bend it into the slight curve. The plastic film is to prevent the epoxy sticking to the lead.

The result is fairly good. I had made the spline a little too tall for the slot so that I can cut it down to the correct height as the depth of the slot is not consistent.

Here the spline has been planed down to the correct height and it is ready for the next phase which will be carried out later.

The scraping work continues albeit slowly due to the heat.

The cedar plank arrived in the post during the week from which I will fashion a new skeg.

But firstly I cut out a cardboard template to make sure that I can get two pieces out of the plank. As you can see, not only can I do that but I can avoid the knot in the plank as well.

The wooden stem of the boat is not in very good condition once the keel band was removed and will need to be strengthened before a new band in put in place. This meant that I needed to remove the bobstay, technically the lower bobstay chainplate. Conveniently this is made in two pieces.

I say conveniently because of the six screws (brass of course) holding the fitting to the hull, three came out easily, two turned but did not come out and one broke off.

The leftmost screw shown here is the one that broke off.

Still, with the bolt holding the two parts together removed, the individual plates came away easily. Oddly, the bolt was stainless steel, not brass.

With the chainplate removed it was easy to clean up the area as you can see.

I used my nifty 6.3mm screw-removing tool to take out the degraded brass screw…

Then glued in an Ash dowel. The excess glue was removed with a wet cloth. Once the glue was dry I cut the plug flush with the hull using a pull saw.

Then it was back to work with the hot air gun and scraper.

It is quite apparent that neither of the two previous owners worried too much about bumps and scrapes, they simply filled in the dings with filler and painted it over. None of the damage is deep, no more than a millimeter for these scratches, but there are a lot.

Here is a closer look at some of the scrapes on the sides.

And some on the bottom of the hull nearer the keel.

I am under regular scrutiny by a neighbour who sits outside his house in the sun and can see me working, so I make sure to be seen to sweep up the scrapings and then putting them in a stout bin bag.

I don’t know how many coats of topside paint there are on the boat, but I can easily see four different shades of green and which looks like an undercoat.

As a result some of the scrapings that come off in one piece right down to the wood are quite thick.

This one is 1mm or 1/16″ thick.

Removing the antifouling is very hard work, so I decided to slop a load of the stripper on the paint and leave it overnight to see if it made the removal task any easier.

Progress here is about a third of the way down the side. Progress, but slowly.

The forecast for one morning was for light rain, so I used a plastic tarpaulin to keep Shoal Waters dry. No stripping for today. To wet, then too hot and then because I had too many other non-boat tasks to do around the property.

I also broke the scraper. Well, not broken exactly, but the heat of the sun and the heat of the hot air gun softened the plastic handle enough that the metal scraper section came out, even under light scraping.

As you can see, I have “mended” it with a bolt. Not sure if that will work. If not, then I’ll have to try and buy a new one.

Or make a new handle out of wood.

Time for a cup of tea.

I decided that it would be prudent to try to find the best method of removing the antifouling (AF), and in this case “best” meant fastest that left the hull in good shape. A secondary concern was to leave me in good shape as well, so anything requiring too much physical effort was discarded.

Getting old is the pits (GOITP)!

I started with my best paint scraper and removed as much of the loose AF as possible.

As you can see, the results were mixed. In some places the AF came off right down to the wood with ease, in others it was very resistant to being scraped off. I found that the best way to carry out the scraping was to move the tool along the grain of the underlying wood which prevented the sort of damage to the wood that scraping crosswise made.

I then applied a liberal coating of the AF stripper, left it for the ten minutes as instructed…

… and then scrapped it off.

The result was less than impressive. However, the instructions did say that heavy build up might required more than one application.

In this section of the hull I can count at least 12 layers of AF and barrier paint, so the chemical stripper is not looking that effective in this case.

This is the result obtains using the scrapper, a hot air gun and then a light sanding. This is a good way to remove the AF and it works well on the hull paint and boot top as you can see.

There seems to be a scrape in the hull that has been filled and I expect that there will be more dings and scratches found as more of the bare hull is revealed. This one looks like an unexpected encounter with a rock.

This is the scratch with the filled removed. I’ll fill this and any other such damage, with thickened epoxy before the fibreglass cloth is applied.

Having decided on the best AF removal method, I turned my attention to the keel band, the bronze protection strip on the keel. This came off fairly easily as it is not screwed into the wood but mostly into the filler between the two reinforcing timbers.

In places the filler is a soft mastic like material and in others it is something like polyester resin.

It looks quite messy in places but I think it will clean up fairly well.

The plan is to remove the filler and apply penetrating epoxy and then return to the scraping which I estimate will be the better part of a week to effect, depending on how well I hold up physically, GOITP !

The keel band seems to be made up of several different pieces. There’s this huge chuck that looks original.

There’s another section that is of the same sort of width as the big piece but is very thin.

And there are several other pieces that are the half-round cross section that you find on older wooden dinghies. The large piece will probably be put back but the others will almost certainly be replaced with a stainless steel flat bar,

Time for a cup of tea.

It didn’t take long to clear out the gap between the timbers and give it a light sand.

There were more damaged spots in the timbers that were filled with something that looks a lot like car body filler, but it came out easily enough.

These two were quite deep…

… as were some others. Once the majority of the filler had been removed I put on a liberal coat of penetrating expoy.

Interestingly, the epoxy has highlighted two areas of damage, seen in the shadowed area, where the damage is more or less in the same place.

Time for a cup of tea.

The next task in the long list of tasks for the rest of the year was to measure the height of the boot top from the gunwale. I marked a number of spots 300mm apart on the gunwale and measured up from these marks to the boot top, noting them down on a piece of paper I must make sure not to lose.

I use a large square and a soft tape to make the meaurements up from the white marks.

The measurements were not exact but then do not need to be.

I decided to trim the backing pad on the transom next, a quick job with a pull saw..

I noticed whilst cutting the backing pad that the antifouling paint is many layers and quite thick.

I decided to try and measure the thickness, just for information which was a quick job with the vernier calipers.

The thickness was 1.3mm more or less. Not insignificant.

I also noticed whilst trimming the backing pad that the skeg had started to lift off the keel and that meant that the wood underneath was unprotected from drying out. That meant removing the skeg entirely so that i could coat the bare wood underneath with penetrating epoxy.

However, this was going to be a problem. There are two bolts protruding through the hog on the inside of the cockpit.

Once here just in front of the transom…

… and one a bit further forward as can bee seen in the above photo just above the bottom of the image. Both are rusted.

I could clearly see where he front one was located in the skeg by the filler that had been put over the top and a little digging with a screwdriver soon prised the fille out revealing the bolt head, also rusted.

I used the multitool to cut the back portion of the skeg away…

…which revealed the head of the second bolt.

The skeg was very loose on the keel and a little persuasion with a crowbar pulled the whole thing apart.

The front bolt came completely away whilst the aft one had waisted in the skeg itself and when the skeg was removed, the upper part of the bolt was left behind, as you can see.

I hit the top of the bolt a few time, bending over the spike of still good metal in the centre but the rusted part of the bolt just shattered away.

This is where the front bolt was, Just rust remains.

I cut off the aft bolt and then used a drift on both bolts, gently hammering the drift which pushed the bolts out through the hog.

They both pulled part of the hog away but that can be repaired with by letting in a graving piece or, more likely given the very restricted access in the cockpit, thickened epoxy.

I cleaned up the slot between the two piece of timber that Charles added, swept up the mess, sanded the timber that was under the skeg and liberally applied penetrating epoxy to prevent drying out and splitting.

I had thought of plugging the two bolt holes with epoxy immediately, but decided not to since it would be difficult to prevent the epoxy from falling out on the inside where I cannot reach for the moment. So, a better bet will be to plug the holes with softwood plugs, using epoxy to glue them in place. The slot between the two piece of timber will also be plugged with a softwood spline, glued in place with epoxy. If the spline is too difficult to make to fit the very aft end where the slot becomes too narrow, then that part will be filled with thickened epoxy.

I have ordered a Cedar plank from which to cut a new skeg. The plank is 32mm thick and I should be able to get two skeg shaped pieces out of this which will be glued together and the epoxied on to the keel one the sheathing and epoxying has been done.

Before making the spline I need a template.

I wedged a piece of cardboard into the slot and used a black marker to draw along the slot where the spline needs to go.

The wedges served two purposes. The first was to push the cardboard against the side of the slot and the second was to stop it from blowing away !

I carefully cut along the line to make the template. As you can see, there isn’t much of a curve, but it needs to be done. I put this away in a safe place for later.

Time for a cup of tea.

It has been some considerable time since I last carried out any sustained work on Shoal Waters, primarily due to getting my own boat Naiad ready, then launching her then doing some sailing whilst the weather allowed. I will be unable to sail for the next few weekends, so the time has come to continue with the Shoal Waters’ refurbishment.

The first task of the day is to invert the boat since it is the hull upon which I need to work next and that is not possible when she is the correct way up. So, the gantry cranes were rigged and put into position, Shoal Waters on the working trailer positioned and strops attached to the hoists and then the tedious process started.

Down on one side and up on the other.

I dislike this part of boat maintenance intensely.

I know it is necessary but that still doesn’t mean I like it much.

More and more she tipped over.

And despite looking like she would tip right over about here, she did not.

It was only at this point that she finally tipped over the center of gravity and came to rest on the strops and chains on the other side.

This shows just how much the topsides have to cant over before the tipping point is reached.

Then it is lowering down instead of lifting up, again little by little. No need to rush, we were not in a hurry.

Until she was finally down and resting on blocks.

This is as low as she can be, the main hatch frame is a centimetre or so above the concrete. Time to get to work.

The first task is to remove the paint and antifouling from the keel. Parts of it, as you can see here, are already bare, the accumulation of paint having chipped off sometime since she was last in the water.

I set to with a sharp paint scraper and it didn’t take long to remove the majority of the paint from one side of the keel. This is the after photo…

…and this is the before picture. Quite a difference.

It is quite evident that these pieces of wood are the pieces that were first put onto the hull after she was delivered to Charles Stock way back in 1963. In his book “Sailing Just for Fun” Charles says this:

Fitting a shallow keel below the moulded hull to protect it when grounding or hauled ashore, for the winter, was the first problem. Shaping a solid piece of wood was beyond my skill so I used two pieces of wood three inches by a half inch, laid each side of the keel ridge and glued and fixed into the hull laminates and hog with alternate gripfast nails and brass screws every three inches (p25)

And surprisingly the nails and screws are in better condition than I expected.

There is a lot of evidence of repaired dings and scrapes along these two pieces of timber, but that was the reason for them being there in the first place.

The keel looks to be in poor condition when first viewed but this was not the case.

Here is the keel with most of the paint removed and having been given a fairly aggressive sanding using an angle grinder and a sanding disk.

Finally, the exposed wood was liberally coated with the penetrating epoxy I have. This was an important step in the cleaning up of the keel. We have just had several week of hot weather and although is wasn’t hot today, the forecast indicates that the temperature will rise again over the next few days and the last thing I want to happen is for the exposed timber to dry out and split.

Hence the epoxy coating. I’ll probably put another coat on tomorrow, just to ensure good penetration.

This will not be a problem for the hull itself as this is made of four 2.5mm layers of Agba that have been glued together in a process known as hot moulding. This heats up the wood and glue and the glue then seeps into the wood. It is unlikely that the hull will dry out and split even in the hot weather.

The next task on the list is to measure the distance from the underside of the gunwale to the lower edge of the boot top so that when I get to the point of repainting I know where to put the different layers of paint.

I noticed that the bilge runners were not in good shape as I worked on the keel.

This is an example. Both runners have cracks and crushed sections and will need some serious remedial work. The damage to the keel, skeg, forefoot and bilge runners is not at all surprising when you consider that Shoal Waters spent most of her life to date on drying moorings where the ground consisted of shingle and mud.

Every time the tide went out, she would be deposited on the shingle and every time the tide rose, she would be lifted off the shingle. Now, in calm weather that would not be a problem, but even in a moderate slop, the waves would bounce the boat on the ground for a few minutes until she was firmly aground, or floating.

And that is when the majority of the damage occured.

Nothing major, it just looks bad,

Time for a cup of tea.