Keel Update

Quick stop by the boat today, as I had some actual work to do on customers boats.

Sanded off the old fillers on port side now, looks very good. Need to clean up the low spots and I can apply fairing compound.

Hrs 3

Not going to be able to finish up the keel by christmas, as the yard closes on thursday for a few weeks. Drag!

More Keel Work/Soy Strip Update

Made great time taking the bottom paint off the keel, and began sanding/smoothing the keel out. Glad I'm taking the time to do this. It would bug me knowing there were flaky pieces of patchjob hanging off my keel. Even if it makes zero difference to actual speed, i'm one of those people that sails better knowing I've done my prep work. Whether it's wind checks before the startline or cleaning the traveler track, I go faster when the details are in place.

Tried Soy Strip on the bottom paint, expected the cold to make it less effective. Pleasantly surprised to see that it works great, even in 40deg! I had a halogen light on it for about a half hour, and it still scraped right off. Here's the least fascinating video ever, showing how easily Soy Strip took off my VC17.

Scraped off some of the lousy patches from the keel. Like most 40yr old boats, it's got quite the melange of different colors and substances. Brown VC, blue gelcoat, gray lead, white primer (?) red god-knows-what, yellow what-the-hell putty, green chewing gum (i think) and many more.

Started sanding the stbd back edge. Feels great so far. Boat is getting quicker, I can feel it. Here is yet another thrilling keel photo. Hours: 6 today (+3more friday sanding stbd keelside)

Decided to give myself a deadline of getting the keel finished before christmas. May be unreasonable as I've got a few big projects on customer boats. A mast track, a mast step, new furling and repairing this gem:
This boat made a nice wrap on their halyard, and nearly unwound their headstay. The furling line was broken, which makes me that the line breaking possibly saved this boat from losing it's headstay. The scary thing is, I took a look at this boat before this happened. They had a totally different problem that required going up the rig. Before I go up rig's I check all the shrouds, pins etc. Their chainplate pulled out of the deck when I shook it! For that and a billion other rigging faults I strongly cautioned them not to sail the boat, to drop the rig and have a glass guy fix the chainplate bulkhead, while I looked over/fixed the other problems. Argh. Please listen to me when I sound serious!

Merry Christmas from Shields 88

Wasn't planning on doing a Christmas special, but Shields 88 has it's own ornament (s)!

We picked up a tree (most of one anyway) for our apartment, and while putting up ornaments I discovered someone had made an official Shields 88 ornament: a glass globe filled with... teak dust?

Niki remembered my promise to take 200lbs of weight off the boat, and measure it the whole way. Including the dust. Well, she seems to be keeping me honest, as we've got 1oz of teak dust with a holiday theme!

Funny girl. She sails too. And sands things.

Epoxy in cold temps/Wood2

Went back today to check on the fairing strip epoxy job. The yard is at a pretty constant 30 now, which is too cold for an easy epoxy job. To make it work, I warmed the surface first, kept the epoxy pot warm, and had space heaters and lights going under a tent.

Came back today in order to post cure the epoxy. Postcuring is heating up gelled/cured epoxy to complete the curing process. It's supposed to make it stronger, and in our case, finish off the cure.

The epoxy from the other day had cured, and was hard/firm. I heated it with a heat gun, for about an hour total. Once it was warm to the touch it smelled like wet epoxy, so I assume it was curing.

Stopped by to look at Shields 45, which has new owners. They're in the middle of similar projects to mine, and are currently stripping the bottom.

After the brief visit to the yard, we went to the shop to continue sanding the teak interior pieces. Going very well, almost done. We did a test spot of interlux teak oil, and generally like the way it looks. I'm a little concerned about the slip factor.

Total hours: yard 1, shop 2/2

Fairing Strips on

Hooray, one more unfun job done.

Originally the Shields came with bronze fairing strips at the back edge of the keel. These covered the gap between the keel and rudder, and acted as a base for fairing compound. Nearly every Shields I've seen has cracks around the strips at the end of the season. I imagine this is due to a)fairing compound not sticking well to either side of the bronze, and the bronze expanding and contracting with temperature.

The solution to this is to replace the stips with fiberglass. I used the cape cod strips, but you could use any piece of fiberglass or G10 better yet.

To remove the old ones I started by trying to take out the 40yr old silicon bronze screws, which strip quite easily. It would take hours to extract all the screws (theres about 16 per side) but it takes about five seconds to grab the bronze strip with a vice grip and tear it off the screws. This is the most fun part of the job. 1hr

Once thats off you've got 30 some holes to fill (I overdrilled and shot epoxy with 404 in) and a surface to clean up. On 88 the surface needed a lot of scraping and sanding to remove the old putties and fillers. 3hr

Next came the fitting of the strips. This is harder than it sounds, as the top end of the strip has to be cut pretty precisely, and the edges have to be beveled. If not, the top of the strip will show a gap where it meets the rudder skeg. In addition,the after edge of the keel is not a straight line, so you either have a gap or shape the front edge of the strip. Also annoying is the #10 half inch self tapping screws I used tend to strip heads when fitting, so I got to extract about 5 of the little bastards. Upside is I got to try a few new screw extractors. Downside is they don't work any beter than the old ones. Really tricky was countersinking the screws correctly. The strips are thinner than the head of the screw is tall, so you have to countersink them slightly into the glass. This is easier once you've set your countersink to the right depth, but it's still easy to go too deep (screw doesn't grip strip) or too shallow (screw head is proud of strip) This part of the job was the most irritating and took about 6hrs

Today I did the last bit and attached the strips. Prep was important. I wrapped the rudder in 6mil plastic to keep it from getting glued. I could have used thinner, but experience tells me that the thin stuff will shrink and melt when heated. Since the yard is now in the 30's I have the whole boat tented, and warmed with a space heater. Additionally, I warmed the surfaces with a heat gun until it's hot to the touch. I used West epoxy with the fast hardener, and lots of 404 and 406 adhesive fillers. Super critical: keep the epoxy warm! I set it down on the ground for a few minutes and it got sludgy and difficult to work with.

The strips are bedded down with the thickenend epoxy, brushed with epoxy on the mating surface then attached with screws. Quite a bit of epoxy came out of the seams, but I figure better that than a void. I kept the heat on with a space heater and 700w halogen light until I left the yard. Hopefully it stays in the 40's inside my tent for a while tonight. I'm returning tomorrow to post cure it with a heat gun. Attaching the strips took around 4 hrs.

To do this again I would budget around 15 hrs including cleanup and heatup. Hopefully his means no cracks to fill at the end of the season.

Next step is to remove the paint from the keel, as I've decided I may as well fair the whole keel at once. Slightly more work, but this means I don't have to work around existing bottom paint. Looking forward to it!

Wood

In order to take a full job off the huge task list, we pulled and started sanding the interior wood from Shields 88. It's pleasant to have a nice straightforward job for once.

There's quite a bit of wood on these boats, you don't realize how much until you have to take it all off! Theres about 65' of 1x1" teak for the toerail, about 30' of thin x 5" teak for the coaming, 4 floorboards and 2 benches. The really special thing about 88's teak is that it seems to be original, so the wood we're messing with has been around for 40 years!

As we found it, it was mostly in ok condition. It was complete, but a bit gray/black, and the birds of Canal Street Marina had definitely labelled it. We took the benches and floorboards out to the shop to sand/oil the whole mess.

Niki was along for the ride, which certainly made getting it off the boat easier! While not too heavy (although I considered ways to lighten it all...) it's awkward to move a wood bench around, under tarps, down ladders etc.

Anyway, here's the photo's to prove we did work. If these aren't convincing, theres about 1 gallon of teak dusk in the shop vac you're welcome to.

Niki enjoys sanding. She really does. Too bad she works or I'd be setting her to paint prep and going out for coffee all day.

Side by side comparison between the benches. The woods really high quality teak, which I suppose was common at one point. Sands out to a really nice orangish color. Kind of makes me wish we could leave them bare, and keep them inside! They're getting oiled before going back. Not for a second did we consider varnish, as neither one of us feels the shine is worth the work.

What else is going on? Fairing the whole keel now (sigh) as there are a few previous patches that have lousy adhesion. Going to strip it, fill/fair, interprotect and VC17. All of this has to be done with heaters and lights since we're in the unheated building. Looks like we might keep the boat this year, for cost/time/temp issues, but that will free us up for doing more important things, like the bottom and rigging. We've got a new main and jib on the way, which is probably the biggest speed buy we can make.

Coming up soon is finishing off the keel, then starting on the bow repair, forward hull/deck tabbing and then someday I can do what I actually know how to do and rerig the boat.

The keel seam, abridged

For the readers sake, I've decided to combine posts on the keel seam. Sorry, but there's no way to make that interesting! To promise something good, heres a few things we've got in store for later (read: too cold to epoxy) blog entries:

-partner box and shim system that works! No more gaping hole in the deck filled with wood and doorstops...
-re rigging the mast and boom, so we can bring the boat from 1964 to at least the late 90's
-soft dyneema attachments for just about everything. I bet theres 3lbs of stainless steel bails alone on this boat.
-new control line and deck layout
-much more

For now, Im still working out the keel seam. This has involved quite a bit of labor so far, and theres more to come. A large part of the time involved is my trepidation towards grinding too much. If I could do this again I wager the grinding would take about 4 hours instead of 12! The difference would be in taking off the right amount the first time, instead of chickening out and doing more then next day. Here is a play by play of the keel seam to date:

-strip the bottom paint (see earlier post) to avoid grinding and breathing the VC17
-grind around the keel seam, about 4 inches above and below. This is to make room for the biaxial tape.
-tightening the keelbolts. This part was fairly terrifying, as you're applying a lot of torque to 40 yr old bolts! I used the cape cod instructions and everything turned out ok. There was one bolt that had a broken bronze backing plate, so I ended up making one out of G10 laminate. Great stuff, very strong. I hope I never have to do this again though! Heres a photo of the backing plate before washer and nut. The goop is epoxy and 404 filler, which was squeegeed away before it set, but after full torque was on.
-applying the biaxial tape. This was great fun, especially after all the grinding. Nothing sophisticated here, just two overlapping layers of 15 oz biax cloth layed up hot. Here is the thrilling photo:

As you can see, theres a bit of resin dripping out the bottom of the repair. This is due to some fairly aggresive rolling of the laminate, and was easily cleaned up with a scraper. I figure better to waste some resin than have: a) air bubbles, b) too much epoxy. When all was done I had a nice smooth glass layer, which will hopefully be enough to resist the inevitable flexing that goes on in this part of the boat.
-fairing compound: I applied this hot, ie after the resin holding the glass resin had gelled and gotten tacky, but before it was cured. This means you can put up a couple layers in one go, and not have to clean off amine blush/sand. I used a ton of 407 filler, mixed with a relatively small amount of epoxy to get a very thick mix that hung well to the keel. Applied with a spreader this comes out pretty ready for longboarding.

Next step is to fair, using a longboard and 36 grit, then the inevitable reapply of fairing goop, then more sanding. After that I'll throw on about 4 coats of interprotect barrier coat and sand again, then VC17 in spring.

Yay.

Keel seam:

additional 10 hrs