Recent content by tenders

Christian's 1981 biography of Ted Turner is a great read, despite the fact that it ends before a lot of the action took place that turned TT into even more of a household name. Christian's telling of the 1979 Fastnet race from aboard Ted's winning boat is incredible, and was written when the...

I held out hope for my hatchboards for a long time...but I bought a 4x8 sheet of 3/4" StarBoard to replace my side coamings, and was able to make a new set of StarBoard hatchboards out of the leftovers of that. They're a bit heavy but I've done nothing to them, or to the side coamings, for...

Here's the documentation of a fix I made to my bulkhead rot problem 16 years ago. I basically cut a trapezoidal shape out of the bulkhead removing all the rotted area, and glassed in a 1/4" G10 trapezoidal replacement patch using eight layers of fiberglass. I'd do it again like this somewhere...

Another big fan of self-tailers here - I added genoa sheet tailers last year and love them. I'm only, what, 40 years late to this party or so? There is an abundance of used winches out there from boat salvors and secondhand equipment shops like the famous Minney's in Newport Beach, CA, and this...

The Admiralty Court will have a field day with this. Clearly that boat was required to yield to the vessels on her starboard side, according to COLREGS rule 15. Crossing so closely in front of the vessel with the camera was decidedly unseamanlike. No “not under command” dayshape was evident...

Just an addendum to this necropost - I see that an organization called CP Marine is now billing themselves as "CP and H&L Marine Woodworking," and their website shows photos of products with the old H&L Marine logo on them. https://cp-marine.com/ ‭(310) 538-5528‬ woodwork@cp-marine.com 17800 S...

If the thought of stepping and restepping the mast seems like a daunting amount of work, you should definitely not buy a distant boat. The mast will be the easiest part of the process. And I wonder if your expectations of “turnkey” are going to be realistic in the 35-38’ range. The only turnkey...

I’d not heard of this before, and Google was not my friend, but this arcane product HAS been brought up here before…starting 20 years ago. https://ericsonyachts.org/ie/threads/stupid.2219/ Apparently, as an “industrial product,” it isn’t “paint” the same way Velveeta isn’t “cheese.” Well, maybe...

I’m certain a bulb exists that will fit that socket, probably less than $5, and probably a nice bright LED bulb in any of a dozen colors if you like. Marinetics Corp was mostly in the assembly business, and maybe in the faceplate-printing business, not the light bulb manufacturing business. They...

You make a good point about the potential range of rudder failure points. I am biased towards the risk of foam failures, probably due to the simplicity and visibility of my 32-2’s tiller-steered rudder, which is easily removed and inspected, and has been pretty regularly over the years. The...

I was worried about this with my OEM rudder (1969-2010), which had several other concerning signs of being waterlogged and weakened. I found, after replacing it with a new one from Foss Foam, that although the foam was old and wet and undoubtedly subject to many freeze/thaw cycles in the...

I use a heat gun and a scraper I don’t care about, because the heat gun eventually melts the scraper a little, if you’re doing it right. This gets 95% of the old coating off. The rest comes off with the orbital sander, which you need to use anyway.

I can’t speak to the rudder bearings but the fiberglass around the rudder is surely grindable and repairable, with epoxy and strips of fiberglass cloth and roving, to a level of fortitude exceeding the original. In the course of that repair you might discover that what is cracking is just...

There are fuel and water tank manufacturers all over the place - if you know what you want, ask around and I’m sure you’ll be referred to a local shop who fabricate one-off tanks of all types and sizes all day long. Only when somebody has something off-the-shelf does paying for shipping empty...

I have not found it particularly difficult to reassemble the spreaders and shrouds on my 32, which is a double-spreader, deck-stepped rig with forward and aft lower shrouds. I don’t know how much more complicatedthe 38’s rig is than that. But wow, once the mast is down and the spreaders are...