What's the plastic material on the side decks?

[MikeP]

The MYs all have a plastic "fence" around the side decks/aft deck. What material is that? It appears to be heat-formed at the bends at the stern. Is that correct? Ours has a crack near the bend in the aft port side that was barely visible when we bought the boat but has now expanded noticeably.

I can't think of any way to fix it other than putting a verticle strip of some sort of plastic material bolted from both sides of the crack and then putting a strip on the starboard side to match it. Does this sound right or is there a better way?

The pic is not very good because it's cropped from a much larger pic...

[rswirtz]

Sams sells that stuff, pretty $$$ though. I think Paul said you could fabricate them from starboard.

[SKYCHENEY]

Starboard is too flexible, especially in the heat. My recommendation is to buy the original dodger board material from Sams.

[Genesis]

Buy a Steiner Heat Gun and re-weld the crack back together.

Trivial to do. It takes PATIENCE but nothing more.

It won't look PERFECT but it sure beats replacing the entire thing for what is a single crack.

I've recently discovered just how nice thermoplastics can be in this regard. Truly amazing.....

The Steiner gives you pinpoint control of the temperature (set it on a digital keypad on the back) and comes with an assortment of nozzles.

I got one to fabricate parts for my rebreather and it has turned into one of my most useful tools. It is also good as a general-purpose heat gun - while more expensive than the cheapie variety you can CONTROL the heat level which is of huge benefit when trying to do things like lift old flooring, shrink heat-shrink tubing on electrical terminals and such - the cheap ones have a habit of scorching things where this gives you the EXACT temperature you're looking for.

This is the one I have:


Buy it here:

http://www.howardelectronics.com/steinel/ngkits.html

Awesome tool and IMHO one that should be on ANY boat. It will fix that crack in about 15 minutes.

[Jaxfishgyd]

the dogerboard for my two corners would ONLY cost $200 each.... Which is why I have left them open... Hey makes it a lot easier to put the dock lines on for the Admiral....

[yachtsmanbill]

Mine are open as well. I may make a top half panel, but trying to fish the lines onto the cleats from over the top really bit the big one!! At 10 mph its not like you need the wind protection. ws

[Angela]

Now, that's what we should do! I've got the handrails that are raised to "certified passenger" level. No matter how hard we've tried, we simply CANNOT get the aft lines on without going down on the swim platform to do it which we hate to do because of the danger factor. There is just too much distance between the railing and the cutout for the lines. We have been planning to remove whatever it is across the aft deck anyway and replace it with some sort of smoked Lexan type product. What is currently back there is flexible, ugly, and does crack. I don't think it's dodgerboard.

[Jaxfishgyd]

Bill,

Now I dont feel so bad....

Least my handrails have varnish on them

OK, yes I'm looking for a positive thing to say..... About MY boat...

[yachtsmanbill]

But there is (some) varnish on my rails! I'm letting mother nature do the stripping... no VOCs. Actually, I sand the loose stuff off, wait a week and do it again. Should be ready for varnish in about two weeks...
Now you guys have hurt my feelings. I'll hafta get on the brightwork instead of getting the crapper going

With all the money I save on no varnish I bought a DIGITAL CAMERA haha.
ws

[MikeP]

Great - two good solutions!

Karl I like that Heat Gun. I have a regular heat gun - a glorified hair dryer - but the one in the pic looks like definitely an "I got to have that" tool!

Removing part of the board also looks like a good, functional idea. I'm not sure I'd (or more importantly, the Admiral) would like the look though. WS, Do you happen to have a pic of the rear quarter of the boat with that cut out included - I'd like to see how it looks from the "outside." If you don't want to post it here you could email it to me - miclor53@gmail.com