Boat work!

When you work in the marine industry, you quickly find that the boat that gets the shabbiest treatment when it needs it most is yours! I've been dying to work on 88 for a while, but have been incredibly busy (the good kind) at work and haven't wanted to miss anything.

Today, a crappy situation turned into a good one, but tomorrows going to suffer... I was all set to make up a bunch of rigging, but when I opened up the shipment, the rope I needed wasn't in there. Argh. It's getting overnighted to me for tomorrow, which means I'll be working until 7pm, but the upside is I was near our harbor, with no work I could possibly get done, which meant time for 88.

The big thing on my mind lately has been the fact that 88 was slowly sinking, and for 3 weeks I was too busy to fix it! The rudder packing nut leaked a bit last year, which turned into a LOT this year. Like 2 or 3 drops per second, which meant about 50 gallons in the boat today.

I was a bit paranoid about the fix, as all the advice I've heard has said that the boat has to get pulled to fix this, and that water would rush in when the nut was off. My plan was not to pull the boat, but rather to lift the transom the 4" neccesary to get the rudder head above the water using the crane at Belmont. Just for kicks, while working on other stuff, I tried pulling the nut off and seeing how much water came out. Turns on not much at all, so I just pulled off the rudder head, pulled out the old packing and put in some new fanct PTFE packing.

Here is the post without the rudder head. There is a packing nut (top) and a lock nut (bottom):
Here is the inside of the nut with 3 layers of new packing. The cuts in each row of packing are staggered so the gaps don't line up, and also bias cut on the ends in order to have more contact area and less leak.

Putting the head on was the hardest part! It's a tight fit, and there is a keyway, so I found it helpful to spread the head apart with a screwdriver. Your mileage may vary. Some Boeshield and WD40 helped ease the way too.

Last tricky bit was getting the bolt that holds the head tight in place. Duh, it turns out there is a slot machined in the rudder post to accept the cross bolt, which locks the head in place.

Seriously, this took like45 minutes once I got in there, and the helm feel is as good as ever (probably the top priority for me in Shields)


Also added some "millionaires tape" to the front of the mast where the jib sheet shackle hits it, and also where the covers zipper was chafing it. Also added tape to the front edges of the partner box, and wherever the sheets (or anything else) would snag. I already got other areas aloft, like the area around the main halyard sheave, the hounds (where the spin halyard could snag/chafe) etc. Millionairs tape is actually just PTFE tape with a silicone adhesive. Great stuff.
t st Also worked up a workable way to use a Harken Rigtune Pro with 7/32" wire. It's only specced to 5mm (3/16") wire, but I've held off getting one since our lowers (which we adjust most) are 5.5mm. It will in fact return accurate readings, but requires marking your own calibration spot on the arm, as the stock ones are nowhere near loose enough for use with 7/32". I've got it all set up, and use the Rigtune to generate a little "cheat sheet" on our boat, which quantifies in lbs how much each 1/2" turn of a turnbuckle actually is. Based on my experience last year, we're going to have a range of 1/2 turn + or - on the uppers, and 1-1/2 turns + or - on the lowers. Also marked our headstay in a couple ways. Our base is 48", which corresponds to middle of the middle tape on our turnbuckle. Based on conditions we vary that quite a bit, enough for 3 tape marks.


Cleaned up some other things, like cut off the long halyard tails, so that when main and jib are at their max eased position (jib on deck, main on boom on deck) there is 4' of tail sticking out. This should clean up the pit area, although Joc has never gotten in trouble before.

Added the worlds most ridiculous Shields main halyard: It's a Tylaska S5 spool shackle, onto 5mm Dynex Dux, spliced into a tail of 1/8" endura-12, with a polyester cover for the handled parts. This is MASSIVE overkill, as the Dynex breaks at 10k, and the most load I think a Shields main halyard would ever ever see is 1000lbs, and thats in conditions windier than we usually sail in. BUT. I'm doing a lot of work with Dux, and wanted to have a test piece to learn more about it. 5mm is the smallest size available to me, so it's what I was stuck with. It's already been helpful to see how this stuff splices, accepts cover, and interacts with other lines. It should also be a _zero_ stretch halyard, or as close as is possible in the real world. At the end of a couple years I'll break the dynex to see where/how it fails, and use that info in other things.



PS does anyone want to buy our old main halyard? It's a stripped 5/16" vectran halyard, blue/gold cover with bluish goldish core. Tylaska P4 on the end. First $125 takes it. Has one season of use, and should last for a long time yet.