Deck Delamination / Core Problems

[Sprite]

Mike,

I have the mushy stuff on the portside on the walkway to the
side of the cabin. I don't like the starboard walkway or the front a
head of the cabin. It seems to be leaking through the chainplates
and the bureau and wall seem to have water damage and I will probably be replacing all of it just to play it safe. I haven't
really seen anything with the cabin roof is it better to nail
it anyway, or forget it ? What should I be looking for in the interior skin in the water damaged area is it fiberglass or
plywood should it be replaced and with what material.


John

P.S. The anchor chain pipe fitting I am moving to a more forward position on the starboard side but I have the old hole and it's
four inche's by 21/2 inches. What should be the procedure of filling it in. It's kinda big?

[Greg]

Ebb, Tony et al. Thanks for all the advice. I think the deck job is gonna have to wait until springtime. I don't want to get halfway into it and have the weather turn sour. I think I will just finish the outside of the hull and then work on the interior over winter. I have removed most of the paint from the hull above the waterline and I'm starting to repair dings and errant scraper gouges before fairing and painting. The list gets longer and longer.

When I repair the deck I will be using epoxy...I will be using the tools I have and replace the core with whatever seems right when I reach that point. I don't want to have to do that job over so I will do it right, however, "right" is a pretty conditional word. Like Ebb says, working on the boat is an end itself. It's theraputic...all that sanding and scraping. Doesn't require much thought so your mind can wander: imagining wind and wave, warm sandy beaches, midnight watches, distant shores...makes a guy kinda drooly and misty eyed.

The whole thing is theraputic...sanding, scraping, fairing, planning, imagining. All part of the process. I'll og ooutside tomorrow and take some pictures of the messes I've made so far.

[ebb]

The epoxy I use is good down to 40 degrees F. You can warm the boat up inside with a heater, Especially with this deck job. Cover with black plastic (won't stick) to help it kick off.

Check out the www.epoxyproducts.com site. This guy flogs many vendors, so he's not commited to any manufacturer's system. He's very opinionated, the site is a gas! A little eccentric, which I'm more friendly with. Here is where you learn not to trust and use adulterated epoxies that you can buy at your local seveneleven marine store. He's a lot cheaper than retail. He'll answer your questions. He sells epoxies that will set up under water, So he may have a laminating version (thin) that will work where you are.

Which Spring are you talking about?

[marymandara]

Hi, all...
I was getting ready to cut the side deck skins today, and started thinking about the rigidity and shape of the hull...obviously for best performance we want as uniform a shape as we can get, and it suddenly struck me that the deck makes up quite a bit of rigidity! Another fellow I know has an identical Triton out in the yard on an identical bunk. His is of course assembled, making for much more weight up high, and on top of that the stick has been lowered for transport and secured to the pulpit, coachroof and pushpit. Reason would have it that his boat should be flexier than mine, as while some of my interior has been cut away I still have the majority of structural bulkheads in place. Wrong!!!
I have had occasion to A/B the two, and mine is floppy. Has to be the decks. There was almost nowhere you could step in a cored area that the deck didn't oilcan badly if you weigh 170 pounds like I do, or in places if you weigh 55 pounds like Junior!

If the hull is out of shape and I recore well, the hull is going to be forever locked in that distorted shape by the newly rigid and sound decks .


Point being, that if the boat isn't level, some distortion is going to happen in the hull from the weight on the jack pads...not on an old Pearson, huh? Guess again!
Bear in mind that the hull thickness is not near so huge as we roll up above the keel root, and gets much thinner(!) up by the deck/hull joint. Check out the pics from the deck removal at Tim Lackey's Triton Daysailor site!

So, armed with a long level and my smallest, lightest, most patient helper (who is also 7 years old) I set about to deal with it. The question comes to mind just what and where to trust on the boat. We set the level across the toerails up forward and found that the boat needed to come up almost an inch at the rail to make it right. Since I have the coamings off now, we laid the level across the cockpit sills and found the reading differed only slightly. Tried a shorter level across the lips of the cockpit locker openings and found it to concur. Further investigation showed that the Stbd. toe rail is in fact about 1/16" SHORTER than the one to port(!) and that accounted for the near total of the discrepancy.

Now, the question also begs as to just how swell the uniformity of the hull shape might or might not have been held at the time the deck went on...they really pumped these boats out, so who knows. I just didn't want to compound whatever problems may be there.

My boat is set up on a 6-pad bunk, and because of the number of people who are sometimes working at one time, I have a v-head jack under the bow and two extra jacks placed well aft to minimize the shimmy of the bunk and oilcanning (well, as much oilcanning as glass this heavy will do as it flexes) of the hull. I had a fair ways to go, so I patiently used all the screws (I found that the most significant pushes are from the aft) and cranked it upright in small and gentle increments. With the boat leaning, I was able to go ahead and loosen the pads I needed to tilt to until they really rattled and then a bit. Took forever. Started with the kid and the level up forward, then checked it aft.

I found a few interesting things. One was that no matter how uniformly I had worked, the boat was out of rack end-to-end by about a 1/4 bubble! Wasn't that way when I started. Hmmm.
I dropped all the pads but the v-head and the two aft jacks, then reset. Closer, but now the whole boat was tilting again! Squared it up one more time, then reset the pads. Real close. Right on. Now to make sure the pads were all bearing evenly...I have a drill for this, which is to drop and reset the center pads first, the bow (obviously with v-head in place) second, the stern last. As I backed off the stbd. center, I was informed that we weren't perfectly level anymore. But...the boat had leaned the OTHER WAY FROM THE SIDE I'D JUST BACKED OFF!

None of the pads were gorilla tight, mind you. One bow and one opposite stern were a bit tighter than the rest. That's all it took to make a "pressure wave" in the hull that did this! We went to the 3-point balance again, then brought up bow, center, stern, far stern. Whenever the bows were tight in this process I would slack and reset the v-head, as well. Went back thru again, Jr. watching the level with Jedi concentration. No movement. Rechecked at the bow, and if we allow for the unequal rail dimensions, we are off about 3/64! Not Bad! Just for grins, I got junior down out of the cockpit and then released the pressure evenly on all of the jack pads. The whole Triton will stand up on the keel blocking and the v-head! Reset the jacks again carefully and we went up to check the level fore and aft. Now, I fib not one bit here, with Jessica as my witness, not one bit of detectible change had occurred!

I also found a couple of other interesting things...when we started leveling, it was easy to push the boat up with the jackscrews, but as we got closer to dead level it became much harder. Also, perhaps very telling as to how much the hull does indeed flex, as you get nearly dead level, ALL the pads will rattle loose all of a sudden! I don't see how this can happen unless the whole hull shape shifts due to the weight all bearing straight down on the keel properly.

Anyway, I hope that this is all of some help and/or interest to anyone who is planning to recore or do any other structural/bulkhead work. As the thicknesses are pretty much identical between the two boats and the Ariel much smaller in surface area, I would think it would be less of a concern for Ariel/Commander...but still worth checking.

Dave

[Mike Goodwin]

If you could have checked the boat when it left the factory nearly 40 years ago , you would have found it not to be "square and level". Rarely is a fiberglass , or any other boat material, ever symetrical new or old .(Now it is possible to use computer controlled routers to fair a mold, but very pricey.)
I have seen boats that were an inch and a half wider ( from the centerline) on port over starboard. In other words , don't fret it unless you can see it by the unaided eye ( no levels or strings stretched tight ).
The original molds were made from a 'plug', made by men from wood, lots of room for error. When the mold is pulled from the plug, more error, and when the hull is pulled from the mold, even more error. Then it is all assembled by minimum wage workers, think they really cared how 'square' the boat was. Not until the bulkheads were in and the deck installed does the boat become rigid.
Other than the mold makers and a couple of supervisors, everyone is minimum wage in the glass shops.
Add on to this that Pearson was pulling several hulls a day from the same molds with the same workers and quality control is not what you would like to think it was ( and these were some of the good boats being made at the time )
Oh yeah, this is in the days before OSHA and the EPA , so respirators are nil and everyone is high as a kite from the fumes ( that's why some of the workers worked so cheap ), could add a little more error?

So 1/16 of an inch is a joke , forgetaboutit !

[Tony G]

Dave
Thanks for doing the gruntwork on that one I've always been super paranoid about the hull changing shape on me as I remove more and more of the interior. That is why we stopped chopping where we did(main bulkhead & v-berth) and will rebuild before we evacuate any more of the original interior. I was hoping to get away with using a garden hose water level on the scribed waterline to level and then block the trailer solid. Follow that up with pad readjustment and THEN start to lay the new tabbing. I guess only time will tell. Tony G

[Mike Goodwin]

Dave,

How do you know you had the boat 'plumb' before you started to level ?

The only place most manufacturers tried for accurate shape , was at the waterline.
How do you know you dont have 1/16 more or less gelcoat on the toe rail ? or glass , or resin ?
The hull only has it's original shape , when it is still in the mold.

Lots of boats change shape during a haulout and go back to their previous shape when launched. You are supporting on 6 pads of less than 6 sq.ft. total , I bet. The hull is used to being supported by everything below the waterline.

Want better support while out of the water? Take a 1x6 and run it, full length, between the pads & hull, fore and aft. It will even out the load greatly.

[Greg]

Jeez, although I am anything but an expert, I am reminded in this case of fixing the kitchen chair by adjusting the legs...lemme see...a little off this one...uh nope, too much...

[marymandara]

Well, the toerail is, I should clarify, visibly taller above the deck one side to the other...that's why we picked a few points to check from. I may not have been real clear in my nomenclature...I was pretty tired. The efforts gone to were to bring the hull vertically "plumb" by "leveling" it athwartships.

My thought, again, is that while I am very aware of the fact a boat changes shape out of the water, I wanted to minimize the distortion caused by the jacks to help the shape be as uniform as possible. The hull shape above the waterline is largely supported by the deck's rigidity...so, rotten deck pretty universally equals a flexier hull. I just didn't want to be doing the deck rebuild in a way that would lock in an unnecesarily deformed shape. It's a sailboat, right? So, the topsides above the waterline become PART OF the effective waterline when the boat is in operation. I have not spent time fairing out the ripples and the roving print-thru for appearance, but for that reason.

One point that I found very interesting, is that the boat is intended to stand vertically on its' keel at haulout...and that anything less than that causes quite a dimensional change in the hull. Similarly, it seems that when the boat IS standing vertically on her keel she is under the least amount of pressure from the jack pads. Literally, as I approached that golden spot the pads all went somewhat loose, including the ones the boat had been inclining towards.

In absence of a semi-reliable choice for a place to plop down a level, I'd say that a guy could feel it pretty well when the hull got vertical. And, if she is standing vertical, you can, as we did, carefully loosen ALL the pads except the v-head until the pads go scuffy-scuffy-wiggle and she'll stand straight up.

It's worth note that a bunk is a flexier situation, no matter how heavy it is built, than blocks and jacks on the ground.
Because of this, I think it is best to check that the boat is "plumb"(or whatever we want to call vertically level) periodically.

The reason this came up in my mind to begin with is that not only is the boat on a bunk, not only have I had to readjust the blocking quite a bit each time the yard have moved her around, but when we had her moved into the building we are now renting she travelled quite a ways across a bumpy yard. The floor in the building is crazy out of plane, so they did some artful shimming under the bunk pads to level it up, and then some leveling of the boat with the jackscrews on their own...overall, she looked pretty good for as caterwompy as the floor is, but I wanted to make sure. Personally, I'm glad I did.

Dave

[Mike Goodwin]

To plumb the boat, you should ( and it's not easy);
find the centerline.
Stretch 2 strings fore and aft dead on the centerline,one above the other about 1' stem to stern.
Hang a plumb bob.
Adjust the boat until plumb.

Why not a level atwartships? Deck units are not made as carefully as the hull and the mounting of such is a 'close enough,is good enough' job.

If you factory scribed waterline is still there, try a waterlevel.

Its the bulkheads and not the deck that hold the shape of the hull .

[Sprite]

What kind of jacks should be used to support the deck, while reconstruction is going on. For example the deck is cut out and the balsa is removed. What should the placement be. I was also
interested in finding out if anyone has used devincell. I was on
the deck of a fellow who had I think a thirty five foot nonsuch 1980. He had a mushy deck of balsa and he replaced it with devinicell with west systems epoxy. I think it was injected into the deck. The deck was solid, has anyone tried this and were
there any pitfalls, I was impressed with it. The reason I am asking is because I've heard about leveling the deck and much about baltec, plywood and various types foam. I had at one time a sample of the stuff. It's grooved does this provide better bonding?



John

[ebb]

Does anybody read any of this?

[Mike Goodwin]

I dont think so Ebb, just you, me & the newbies !

[Mike Goodwin]

Well let's just see Ebb;

When #45 was out of the water for deck repairs, I made no special attempt to support the deck from below , took the upper skin off and crawled, walked & climbed all over her taking no special care for anything.
She didn't move flex or loose any shape or camber to the deck.

Now you guys know why we don't want you hanging around the boatyard while we work on your boat.
Boatyard rates;
$35 per hour
$50 per hour if you watch
$80 per hour if you help
$100 per hour if you and your brother-in-law help

Mike G

[Mike Goodwin]

Sprite,

It all works, some better than others . Depends on who is used to what. There is nothing wrong with putting balsa back in, hell it worked for 40 years. I just hope I'm around in 40 years to see the decks go mushy again.