Remember this?!
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Over the last three weeks we’ve been working our little tails off (between rain storms and Dena beginning and completing the first draft of her third novel) repairing our port-side toe rail where the genoa track (plum) tore its fasteners right out of that teak.
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At first we entertained (maybe the wrong choice of words there) the thought of cutting out the bad section completely and replacing it with a scarfed in section of some Ash-wood that we’ve had lying around for quite some time. We’ve both always heard that, because of the different expansion and contraction rates of different woods, it’s never a good idea to do any kind of scarfing with anything but the original kind of wood… That has always made sense to us.
Well, we didn’t have a piece of teak big enough to do the scarf and we didn’t want to just fuck-in a bunch of epoxy so we opted for the next best thing… Fiberglass to the rescue!
First we had to deconstruct a big enough section of the toe-rail to make a fiberglass repair worth the time so we went over to Northeast Harbor, ME. Got a slip for a day and a night and…
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…Broke out the heat gun, the scraper box, and the power-sander and melted our (practically) newly painted toe-rail right down to the bare wood.
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It was awesome! We were on the Hinkley sales dock right next to a million dollar plastic destroyer and we kept getting the shitty eyeball from the salesman that was hanging out in the air conditioned pilothouse of a boat that was definitely not his. Look over Dena’s left shoulder in the shot above… That over priced Clorox-bottle was baby-shit green, ugh!
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The next day we moved the boat back up Somes Fjord to our snug little anchorage and prepped the rail for the next step: penetrating epoxy.
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We saturated the repair site with penetrating epoxy and clamped it down nice and tight then let it dry overnight.
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After removing the clamps we filled the voids with West Systems 610, a thickened epoxy, and let it set up for another night.
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We then sanded it fair, added more 610, and laid on a 8 foot X 6 inch strip of fiberglass.
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It wasn’t as fair as we’d have liked it to be so we sanded it down again, put some more 610 on it and put a second layer of fiberglass over that. That did the trick so the next thing was to start piling paint on it.
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Two coats of beige with our signature green stripe over top and she was ready to put the genoa track back on.
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We didn’t have time to do all the deck sanding that we wanted to do but over all the project went really well.
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Dena steady-handed the caulking inboard and outboard while we were waiting for the fastener bedding to harden up.
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And here it is, our newly refurbished and reconstructed toe rail and genoa track!
Today we took her out for a test sail but didn’t get to put her through her paces, that’s for sure. The wind was only puffing at best and we never got above 1.6 knots.
Oh well, I get the feeling we’ll get to test our handiwork soon enough. Until then we’ll take what weather we can get.
Time to get underway!
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