The seahood is back on and sealed up.
I took the seahood home and tried to remove the traveler from it. The screws came out more easily than expected. They were only engaged about one turn in the aluminum plate embedded in the seahood. With the screws removed I figured it would be easy to loosen up the traveler track. Nope. I am sure someone used 5200 to bed the thing and even when whacked with a hammer it felt like it could only be removed at great cost to the integrity of the seahood and/or the traveler. I guess I will not be upgrading the traveler any time soon.
The aluminum plate was easily popped out of the seahood, revealing a network of old holes from previous travelers and voids in the fiberglass. I filled these with sealant when I reinstalled the seahood. I cleaned all the old sealant off the seahood and tidied everything up.
Back at the boat, I created some new sliding hatch stops out of Starboard and installed them with butyl sealant. I drilled out the broken screw, and miracle of all miracles, the drill bit went straight through and I was able to tap for the same size bolt as the original! Then I hogged out 18 of the 24 fastener holes that had contained wood screws with a Dremel. About half of them were bone dry and the other half sopping wet. The wood core material was remarkably sound even in the wet areas and appeared to be plywood rather than balsa. I filled the holes with epoxy as per the usual method and let it cure overnight.
The next day I returned to find the epoxy barely cured so I had to spend some time with a heat gun to (unsuccesfully) help it along. I think I have a bad batch of epoxy as this is the second time it has failed to cure properly. At any rate, the core had clearly been saturated with epoxy so any water that finds its way into the screw holes will probably not get to the core material. I waffled back and forth between re-using wood screws and using through bolts and eventually decided on the latter, mainly because I wasn't sure if the epoxy would ever cure enough to be able to hold a wood screw. Of course this necessitated some headliner removal.
I used a large amount of Sikaflex 291 to bed the seahood back into place and seal the bolt holes. I decided that I needed to build up a reasonably large dam of material to minimize the amount of water that could sit in that channel and to provide as much area of sealant as possible around each bolt hole. I don't have any photos of this operation as I was moving fast and it was getting dark and starting to rain. I am really hoping this has sealed all the bolt holes. When I started digging into this project I found quite a bit more water had been coming into the boat from the screws than I had originally suspected.
Note: I believe the recessed channel around the sliding hood that accepts the seahood flange is an inferior design that is asking for trouble with water accumulating in it and eventually making its way into the boat through the screws/bolts. The relief holes in the seahood are probably 1/2-3/4 of an inch higher than the bottom of this channel so any water making its way under the seahood into that channel will just sit there. To make matters worse, the bolt holes in the edge of the seahood are located inside the flange that actually makes contact with the channel, so the bolts or screws can't actually compress the sealant between the seahood and the deck.
Finally, my wife and I went back this morning and applied a bead of Dow 795 in the seam around the seahood. Work still remaining on this job includes tacking the headliner back up, reinstalling longer traveler bolts that will capture the aluminum plate and reinstalling the traveler hardware. As boat projects go this was about a 3 on the complexity list (pretty simple job) but a 6 on the annoyance list due to the all the bolt holes and the large amounts of messy sealant involved.
I took the seahood home and tried to remove the traveler from it. The screws came out more easily than expected. They were only engaged about one turn in the aluminum plate embedded in the seahood. With the screws removed I figured it would be easy to loosen up the traveler track. Nope. I am sure someone used 5200 to bed the thing and even when whacked with a hammer it felt like it could only be removed at great cost to the integrity of the seahood and/or the traveler. I guess I will not be upgrading the traveler any time soon.
The aluminum plate was easily popped out of the seahood, revealing a network of old holes from previous travelers and voids in the fiberglass. I filled these with sealant when I reinstalled the seahood. I cleaned all the old sealant off the seahood and tidied everything up.
Back at the boat, I created some new sliding hatch stops out of Starboard and installed them with butyl sealant. I drilled out the broken screw, and miracle of all miracles, the drill bit went straight through and I was able to tap for the same size bolt as the original! Then I hogged out 18 of the 24 fastener holes that had contained wood screws with a Dremel. About half of them were bone dry and the other half sopping wet. The wood core material was remarkably sound even in the wet areas and appeared to be plywood rather than balsa. I filled the holes with epoxy as per the usual method and let it cure overnight.
The next day I returned to find the epoxy barely cured so I had to spend some time with a heat gun to (unsuccesfully) help it along. I think I have a bad batch of epoxy as this is the second time it has failed to cure properly. At any rate, the core had clearly been saturated with epoxy so any water that finds its way into the screw holes will probably not get to the core material. I waffled back and forth between re-using wood screws and using through bolts and eventually decided on the latter, mainly because I wasn't sure if the epoxy would ever cure enough to be able to hold a wood screw. Of course this necessitated some headliner removal.
I used a large amount of Sikaflex 291 to bed the seahood back into place and seal the bolt holes. I decided that I needed to build up a reasonably large dam of material to minimize the amount of water that could sit in that channel and to provide as much area of sealant as possible around each bolt hole. I don't have any photos of this operation as I was moving fast and it was getting dark and starting to rain. I am really hoping this has sealed all the bolt holes. When I started digging into this project I found quite a bit more water had been coming into the boat from the screws than I had originally suspected.
Note: I believe the recessed channel around the sliding hood that accepts the seahood flange is an inferior design that is asking for trouble with water accumulating in it and eventually making its way into the boat through the screws/bolts. The relief holes in the seahood are probably 1/2-3/4 of an inch higher than the bottom of this channel so any water making its way under the seahood into that channel will just sit there. To make matters worse, the bolt holes in the edge of the seahood are located inside the flange that actually makes contact with the channel, so the bolts or screws can't actually compress the sealant between the seahood and the deck.
Finally, my wife and I went back this morning and applied a bead of Dow 795 in the seam around the seahood. Work still remaining on this job includes tacking the headliner back up, reinstalling longer traveler bolts that will capture the aluminum plate and reinstalling the traveler hardware. As boat projects go this was about a 3 on the complexity list (pretty simple job) but a 6 on the annoyance list due to the all the bolt holes and the large amounts of messy sealant involved.
