02 Dec 17:
Tongue was a little bent! Eddie English and crew got the trailer road ready again, added 6 inches to the new tongue, put on new 2 inch coupler with safety chains, bow stop with winch, bow roller, tilt latch and bolt, axle, springs, u bolts, Posi-lube hubs, new bunks with brackets and carpet, and wigher weight capacity 5.70 x 8 inch tires. All hot dipped galvanized or stainless, basically a new trailer for several hundre less than the cost of new. Eddie's crew also got the new lights that I put on working, I learned that tilt trailers sometimes need a jumper ground wire to best ground the tongue to the main frame. Otherwise the ground tries to go through the rusty tilt bolt.
Sanded the keel rub strip with 60 grit on the belt sander then 120 on the random orbital sander.
Second coat of Pettit Easypoxy Blue Ice rolled and tipped. I rolled with a Might Mini foam roller and frame from Jamestown Distributors, they sell a nice foam roller kit that includes the 4" roller frame, solvent-resistant plastic tray, two 4" Mighty Mini foam covers, and disposable gloves for $4.77 USD. The Skipper is an awesome painter and she tipped with a 2 inch chip brush, did a great job. the air temperature was 74F, we thinned the paint 5 percent with brushing thinner because the roller was dragging a bit. For thinner, it is best to use the manufacturer's recommended thinner.
Took out the rotted outboard mount.
Two of the nuts on the back of the outboard recess that hold the bolts on the starboard side were easy to reach through the cuddy, they came off easy with a wrench holding the nut. The nuts on the port side are inaccessible and we kept out fingers crossed removing them, because if the backer nuts fall off then an inspection port might be needed to refasten the mount. The bolt on the top was frozen and it snapped, the bolt on the bottom came out easily and the nut stayed in position, yay. We had read about the port side nuts, so we were prepared. One part of the article mentioned that some Dabbers had 2 port side nuts, some only had one, so we will go with one port side nut for the new mount pad. If we notice any movement we'll look at different options to add another fastener.
We cut a new outboard mount from cumaru. The old mount was 1 1/4 inches thick, we didn't have teak that thick so I planed a 3/4 inch thick piece down to 1/2 inch on the DeWALT compact planer and fastened the two pieces together with silicone bronze screws. Used the old mount to get the port side bolt location, but the starboard side of the old mount was too rotten to use as a pattern, So we put the starboard side bolts in position with a dab of paint on each head, lined up the port side bolt and pressed the backside of the mount against the bolt heads. That left a paint mark on the back of the mount and we drilled the bolt holes using the paint as a reference. We went up one drill size for the bolt holes to allow for alignment slop.
The new mount pad is trimmed a bit on the lower aft corners to fit the rounded bottom of the outboard well, we used a belt sander for that with a 60 grit belt. Then the pad was fastened with marine stainless bolts, washers and stop nuts.
The centreplate!
Log of VICTORY.
