Project Log: Saturday, January 22, 2011
The bonding surfaces atop the raised fiberglass bulwarks
required a bit of work before I could reinstall the
caprails in the near future. At a minimum, these
surfaces needed to be cleaned of any remnants of old,
desiccated sealant; in several other areas, minor repair
and filling was required where old filler had peeled
away when I removed the caprails.
To begin, I used locking pliers to remove a few studs
that remained from some of the lifeline stanchions.
Dedicated readers may recall that I'd needed to take
extra steps to remove the caprails from around these
fasteners, which were forever frozen in place, locked
tightly to their hidden aluminum backing plates.
Now, these few random studs remained above the top of
the bulwark and had to go.
I managed to actually unscrew one of the studs with the
pliers, but the other three or four were so corroded in
place that they simply broke off flush. I planned
to slightly reposition the stanchion bases as needed so
that I could drive new fasteners next to these old, now
permanent, ones, so I made no attempt to remove the
remaining flush bits of the old fasteners.
I scraped away the bulk of old sealant and other debris,
and with some effort removed most of the thick bead of
sealant that had filled the gap between the cockpit
coamings and the wooden caprails at the stern.
Then, I sanded all the bonding surfaces to remove
additional sealant remains and clean up the fiberglass. |
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After cleaning up and an acetone wash, I applied epoxy
fairing material as needed to clean up and level the
tops of the bulwarks. A significant amount of the
original material remained in place, but particularly on
the port side, there were several areas where chunks of
the old material had come out along with the caprails,
all in areas where that fiberglass tape had been
included in the installation. I filled these areas
as needed so that there'd be a flat, generally smooth
bonding surface for the caprails. |
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Continuing down the road towards caprail
re-installation, I sanded and revarnished the bottom
surfaces of all the caprail sections. I was
planning on about four coats total for the bottom sides,
and one more coat on the tops and edges before
installation.
These photos show the bottom sides of the caprails. |
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Total Time Today: 2.5 hours
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