Repair, Tools & Materials

Titanium is of particular interest to sailors due to its resistance to galvanic corrosion. It has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal and is non-magnetic. It is up to 20 times more scratch resistant than stainless steels. Practical Sailor contributor Patrick Childress takes an in-depth look at the metal and its use in the marine industry as his boat, a Valiant 40, is refitted with titanium chainplates and other rigging.

Improperly mounted stanchion and pulpit bases are a major cause of gelcoat cracks in the deck radiating from the attached hardware. The cracks are usually the result of unequally stressed mounting fastenings or inadequate underdeck distribution of hardware loads. Frequently, a boat is received from the builder with local cracks already developed. Once the deck gets dirty enough, these minute cracks start to show up as tiny spider webs slightly darker than the surrounding deck gelcoat While repairing these cracks is a fairly difficult cosmetic fix, the underlying problem - poor mounting - is fairly easy to correct in most cases.

When deciding on a process for clearing antifouling paint and coatings off the bottom of your boat, first define your goals and try to be as minimally invasive as possible. If your boat bottom needs more than a scrubbing but less than a full peel, sodablasting is a technique that will strip bottom paint but leave gelcoat intact. The unique softness of the calcium carbonate powder in sodablasting is effective, and the tented setup keeps the old coating contained. This report outlines the sodablasting process, calculates the cost in time and money, and compares its performance and cost-effectiveness to other bottom-stripping techniques we've tested.

Our foray into sodablasting follows years of testing several different ways to remove bottom paint. Although you can simply attack the bottom paint with a power sander (an 8-inch sander-polisher is probably the most common tool for this purpose), this approach is messy, back breaking, and can expose the do-it-yourselfer to various health hazards. It can also lead to dings and divots in the gelcoat caused by overzealous sanding. Many yards prohibit do-it-yourselfers from sanding antifouling, or offer specific guidelines on how it can be carried out-often prescribing a chemical stripper to help contain the paint residue.

Testers applied dozens of exterior wood finishes (22 one-part varnishes, six two-part varnishes, 18 synthetics and satins/varnish alternatives, and eight teak oils and sealers) to small panels of bare solid teak and set them out to face the rigors of South Florida's weather. Two years later, our search continues for the ideal wood finish-relatively easy to apply, easy to maintain, lasts multiple seasons, and is affordable. Given that most wood coatings are rarely expected to last longer than two years in the marine environment-particularly in super-sunny locales-its no surprise that weve seen more significant changes in the coatings in the last six months than we had in previous checkups. With the exception of a few two-part products, the test coatings had lost their sparkle at the two-year mark, ratings slipped across the board, and weve come to accept that perhaps theres no Holy Grail of exterior wood finishes.

Practical Sailor often supplements panel testing with product challenges aboard our test boats to see whether top products still earn their keep in the real world and to try out new products. Two such evaluations are our exterior wood finish tests. In the January 2011 issue, we introduced a head-to-head matchup of varnish alternatives—market-newcomer PolyWhey from Vermont Natural Coatings versus perennial favorite Interlux’s Sikkens Cetol Natural Teak—that had been applied to our Cape Dory 25 test boat. For that test, we’ve just let nature run its course: no band-aid touchups, no maintenance coats, no freshwater rinses, no TLC at all.

Letters to Practical Sailor, August 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Weems and Plath, and Moorhouse Sailmakers.

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.

Fairing in through hull fittings, as described in the February issue, will go a long way toward reducing bot­tom drag in light air, but it won't really do the job unless the paint surface of the bottom is smooth. A surprisingly high percentage of boats not used primarily for racing have bottom paint jobs that range from poor to atrocious. If your bottom has peeling patches that haven't been in, brush marks from failure to smooth out thick bottom paints, or stipple marks from ap­plication with a roller, your boat will be slower in light air than it could be. Bottom paints, unlike topside paints, are not formulated for smooth application, in most cases. They have a high solids content and quick-flashing solvents, a combination guaranteed to make smooth application difficult. Even the racing boat with the smoothest bottom didn't start out that way.

Probably nothing can make or break the appearance of a fiberglass boat more quickly than the appearance of the exterior teak trim. Contrary to popular belief, teak is not a maintenance-free wood that can be safely ignored and neglected for years at a time. Though teak may not rot, it can check, warp, and look depressingly drab if not proper­ly cared for. Although it is not immune to neglect, teak is incredibly resilient, and can be brought back to life after remarkable amounts of abuse. Therefore, there is no excuse for drab, ugly exterior teak on any boat. Unlike other woods used for exterior trim, the grey weathering of teak rarely extends very far below the sur­face of the wood.