Ideas Needed for Re-sealing Pulpit and Fore Deck

[GOLE IV]

I had a different aproach, I worked form above, gravity helps.
After supporting the deck from below, identified the damage area, looking for weak or soft spots.
Then cut the top deck layer, clean up the roten balsa, put a layer of mat ,replaced the balsa and glassed back the cut area of the top deck.


The black square in the photo is 3/4 steel plate

[bobk]

The pulpit came up cleanly. See pictures. The specks are splinters from the block of plywood in the center. This appears to be a Hatteras installation. The screws in the plywood are all bronze Robertsons. Core damage is quite limited.

The reason for these issues is the original design. 1, there is no effective way to seal the bolts at the deck level. 2, The winch bolts through the pulpit platform to the deck. Four of the bolts did not go cleanly through the stack of plywood (sorry, the holes are covered with the grey duct tape), and two did. But even if they did, the stresses on the core with the undersized backing blocks would allow the core to compress and caulk around the bolts to fail and leak.

Fre deck below pulpit.jpg

Bobk

[Genesis]

Cool - be glad you caught it and fix it correctly.....

[Walter P]

It seems to me that the reason we have these issues is water intrusion and the existing design doesn't lend itself to preventing a recurrance in a few years. What does everyone think about if I remove the top skin under the pulpit again and just remove the new balsa and build up the whole section with mulitple layers of fiberglas. The plywood under the pulpit could also be replaced with solid glass. Obviously it would add a few lbs and a little cost but I can't see it ever failing again.

Walt

[TopHattandTails]

What about removing pulpit or good? That would solve the problem too. Just refinish, and add a light weight aluminum fortress anchor with rope. No more dock banger either...

[GJH]

Brian, that's not a bad idea if you don't anchor out very much. You seldom see sport fishing "battlewagons" such as the new Hatts illustrated above with pulpits, which are considered a point of failure when you stick the nose into a lot of water as those guys are prone to do. A few may still have a windlass. They do still anchor, sometimes in very deep water, but just temporarily. If no windlass, they can use the old anchor ball trick to bring the anchor up.

[SKYCHENEY]

Getting rid of the pulpit also means reconfiguring the railings, etc. Plus, these old classics just look right with the pulpit on there. Fix it right and you won't have any more issues. Most of these with poor installation lasted for 20-30 years. I doubt many of us will still have the same boat in another 20.

[bobk]

I anchor a lot in the ICW muck and having the anchor dangling over the bow makes washing it off convenient, so it is going back on.

Walt, I see no issue with all glass, but you do not need to be so thick. My issue is localized enough that the mech will clean out the old balsa core and replace with thickened epoxy. He will add an extra layer of glass to the underside of the deck inside the anchor locker for good measure. Your plan to over drill the mounting holes and back fill with epoxy ought to last the rest of your ownership and beyond.

But the original Hatteras design still bugs me. Engineers ought to know better. Were bean counters involved thirty years ago?

One other thing. That plywood block shown in the above photo was probably intended to help support the winch. As best as I can tell, it touched the under side of the pulpit in only one corner. We are replacing this with a mahogony block that will be fitted a little better. And I'm considering putting a bead of caulk around the edge to contact the underside of the pulpit. That bead can then be used to contain some thickened epoxy to fill in the remaining space. I'll use some release paper just in case it needs to come up again. But at least there will be solid support for the compressive load of the bolts.

The other 'innovation' (over kill) will be to fit flanged SS pipes into the chain fall and rope fall. That way any future leak should drip into the locker without getting to the core (which will be epoxy coated anyway.

Bobk

[Genesis]

My solution was to do this:

1. Remove the entire core in the area around the pulpit. This in my case wasn't optional as it was trashed.

2. Replace with marine ply soaked in thinned epoxy and laid up into the space with thickened epoxy. Replace lower skin with heavy fiberglass cloth. Since this was all in the locker I didn't care if it looked good -- only that it was strong as hell. We now have an intact (but much stronger than the original, as the core is epoxy-soaked plywood) laminate and the lower laminate is heavy cloth.

3. Drill new oversized penetrations where the old ones were. Remove (new) core in the drilled holes.

4. Fill those core areas with thickened epoxy, then re-drill through the epoxy. It is now impossible for water that gets into the fastener area to get into the core.

5. Re-fasten and put it back together using UV-resistant 4200.

IMHO that's what should have been done in the first place -- the laminate in that area should have been done with epoxy-soaked marine ply instead of balsa as it has massively-superior compressive strength. Then the penetrations should have been drilled oversize, filled, and re-drilled through the epoxy, denying any possibility of water intrusion into the core.

Oh yeah, and no bare plywood under the pulpit either. I built up the underside of the pulpit with resin and cloth and took my time to avoid the exothermic problems that would definitely occur if you tried to do it "all at once". The goal there was to provide a solid foundation for the windlass -- if there wasn't one I wouldn't have bothered, but I wanted a solid connection between the Windlass and the deck so the blocking had to (IMHO) be replaced -- with something that can't rot.

If that had been done the first time it wouldn't have gone bad.

[34Hatt]

Or just use Coosa