Boat Maintenance

DIFFERENTIATING FIRS I enjoyed your destructive wood testing and your patience in waiting eight years to report comprehensive results (see PS December 2023, “Wood Rot...

More than a century has passed since Art Emmons, a visionary young engineer at the 15-year-old Porter Cable Company, launched a technology race in...

One reason for my aversion to scrubbing is that a Corsair F-24 trimaran is a folding trimaran, making it a nightmare to clean. Comprised...

With the myriad ways to combine resins and wood into layers to create plywood, it is no wonder we can get confused when selecting...

Medium Density Overlay, abbreviated as MDO, is a pre-surfaced plywood product developed to make highway signs, so it’s about as weatherproof as you can...

In addition to our panel testing of dozens of paints, we applied six different antifouling paints to our test boat, a Corsair F-24 trimaran....

For two years, we’ve been soaking both our test boat and 11 test panels with 30 different antifouling paints in Rockhold Creek, a brackish...

Wood is strong, stiff per unit weight, easy to work with, attractive, and economical. And it rots. A few special types of wood, such as teak, are highly resistant to rot, but these woods are generally heavy and almost always expensive. Pressure treated lumber is an option, but it’s ugly, warps, does not take coatings well, and is not always very rot resistant. Western red cedar, on the other hand, has long been used in canoes, and cedar fence posts have a deserved reputation for durability. We started our rot resistance testing eight years ago in 2015, and we finally cleaned out our accelerated rot test box in July 2023. Results ranged from abysmal (untreated samples of fir have nearly disappeared) to astounding (our teak samples are still just like new). Let’s see what we learned.

Perhaps one reason our buckets keep cracking is that we have to compress them a bit to fit them through the 10-inch rectangular hatch...

The windows on our Corsair F-24 trimaran were obviously damaged by UV radiation. All we could see through them were shapes of objects that...