Posted by Barry Stellrecht (yak@…>)
Well, it is quite a bit of work, but I’ll give you a summary of what we’ve been
doing:
When we bought our F33, it had all new portlights & hatches, so they shouldn’t
be leaking…and I don’t think the portlights are, but the hatches are a story
for another day.
What we’ve done is take down the headliners so we can see what the bottom of the
deck looks like. In our case, the bedding has failed on enough of the holes
going through the deck that we’ve decided to re-bed them all, at least
overdrilling and filling the edges with thickened epoxy to seal them before
re-bedding, and fixing any other bad balsa core we find. So far, most of the
problems have been somewhere between dime sized around the bolt up to fist
sized, except for a big area around the port winch and rope clutches. (I
haven’t figured out exactly how big that one is yet!
I figure that 27-year-old caulk either has failed (on some hardware) or will
fail soon if stressed (on the rest of the hardware), so I might as well fix it
all now. And, yes, the hand rails have failed in some cases. In the head, the
two failed bolts rotted out three or four inch blobs of balsa. Elsewhere I’ve
had a couple bolts that had corroded off inside the deck, but I haven’t seen how
much damage the core got there yet.
There are two deck leaks that (probably) caused water to appear to be leaking
through portlights. I won’t be sure until we are done fixing them all, and
confirm a lack of leaks around the portlights.
Good luck finding your leaks,
Barry
P.S. If you have really bad leaks that rot out lots of core, tapping on the
deck like a surveyor does might find your soft spots and send you in the right
direction. In our case, only the biggest area (or most thoroughly rotten) was
found that way. Freedom puts a pretty thick top skin over the core so it
doesn’t feel very soft even when the core fails.
Scott Forgey wrote:
I am starting to worry if I need to look at re-bedding the hand rails or
look for another source.Any tips in identifying the source of other potential leaks (other than
the obvious)?
–
s/v Flutterby, Freedom 33 cat ketch (becoming a junk rig)