Boat Maintenance

Letters to Practical Sailor, June 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Barnacle Barrier Success, Pump Switches, Antifouling Field Report and more!

Modern boatbuilders, in their desire to make boats as appealing and comfortable as possible, have made it inherently difficult to conserve water. Plumbing fixtures work just the same as those at home. The demand pressure water pump is quick to maintain pressure and oh so quiet, almost as good as city water. Of course theres hot water aboard, even though we have to sacrifice a quart of cold down the drain before we feel the warmth. The obvious solution to better onboard water management is a manual pump, either hand or foot operated. I recognized this face a whileago, but felt that manual water pumps were for day sailors, not for bona fide cruising sailboats. Pressure water is something you graduate to after paying your dues messing with plastic water jugs and on-deck sun showers. I for one certainly didnt want to regress-even though it wouls be nice for once to have cruising agendas planned around something other than the size of the water tank.

Being a team of diehard do-it-yourselfers, we decided to try our own hand at devising a workable solution to defeating line chafe. After fiddling with canvas, old fire hose, and even messing around with some Kevlar, we settled on leather—an old rigger’s standby. It proved to be rugged and remained unholed after a ride on the belt sander. The fabrication process was kids craft 101, and there was something quite seafaring about the result. …

Being a team of diehard do-it-yourselfers, we decided to try our own hand at devising a workable solution to defeating line chafe. After fiddling with canvas, old fire hose, and even messing around with some Kevlar, we settled on leather—an old rigger’s standby. It proved to be rugged and remained unholed after a ride on the belt sander. The fabrication process was kids craft 101, and there was something quite seafaring about the result. …

Letters to Practical Sailor, July 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Boat Shoes, Rope Cleaning, Rigging Care, Drain Surgery and More!

Letters to Practical Sailor, June 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Whale Pumps, Rigging and More!

Making spare winch handles is a sim­ple job for a competent metal worker. This I discovered because our Norlin designed Scampi, Windhover, has eight winches, all of which were manufac­tured before the world standardized on the 11/6" winch handle lug size. Since Windhover's 9/16" size handles are difficult to obtain and impossible to find at discount I went to Frank "Red' Grobelch, a superb metal­smith/welder of Waukegan, Illinois with some ideas for making up some spares for me. I'm so pleased with the results that I'd recommend the project to any reader who is a competent metal worker or has a friend who is. Even if you can use and buy standard 11/16" size handles, your mental state when clumsy Uncle Fred drops a han­dle overboard will be far more buoyant if you know you can easily replace the lost handle in your own shop.

Fresh air and a dry berth are two “rare," commodities in the belowdecks caverns of most boats. On deck you may be surrounded by endless quantities of fresh air. Below, fresh air frequently comes mingled with similar quantities of fresh or salt water, sometimes in the form of an emulsion that is difficult to breathe at best. Most boats are well ventilated at the dock or at anchor, or even under way in fair weather. But let the wind blow, the spray fly, and the rain fall, and the interior can quickly become a dank swamp if you leave an opening for ventila­tion, or an airless dungeon if you don't. Fortunately, ventilation can be improved in almost any boat, new or old. In the grand scheme of things, improv­ing ventilation is relatively cheap; far less expensive, for example, than installing refrigeration or a sophisticated propane system.

What do you do when the pin in the leg of your folding cabin table digs up the cabin sole? What do you do about the groove in the top of the teak toerail caused by your dock lines? What about the scuffs in the varnish­ed bulkhead behind the companion­way ladder? The answer is that you make chafe plates to solve all three problems. While chafe plates can be made out of almost any material — sheet PVC, thin stainless steel, aluminum — the most readily available and easily worked stuff is plain old brass. Brass can be purchased in many forms: sheet, solid round bar, pipe, tubing, and half oval, for example. It is quite cheap. If you have a local scrap metals dealer, you can buy enough scrap brass in various forms for $10 or less to keep you busy with a lifetime of projects. If there's no metal dealer at hand, most hobby shops carry substantial supplies of brass, although hobby shop brass tends to be thinner than what you want for most jobs.

Sealing the holes in decks where Loran and VHF antenna cables penetrate is a fairly common problem on modern boats. If there were only the cable to be considered, a hole of the appropriate size plus a dab of sealant would do an adequate if tacky looking job. But these cables in­evitably include sizable end connec­tors which require holes much larger than those required for the cable itself. Solutions include removal and reinstallation of the connector each time the cable is removed during storage or servicing, and any number of commercially available through-deck fittings or plugs. None of these solutions is simpler or better than the wood fitting shown here. It is attractive and can be made in a few minutes for a few cents.