Chain Plates

Chain Plates:

These are a mess and look like hell.  I was planning on putting cover plates on top and getting rid of this huge mess.

 

I have three of these on each side supporting the shrouds. On the starboard side they measure roughly 5' x 7".  A simple matter to make a stainless steel plate and secure it eh?  Well not so fast.  First lets have a look under that mess. 

I cleaned off most of one of these.  It is awful.  First the holes were not filled properly.  Next this particular one has play fore and aft.  I may have to pull the whole chain plate to get access to the deck here to fill it after scooping out what will surely be rotten core material.  My helper Marco has done that several times already.  That is not so hard to do.  The real problem is what to do about the deck to make it look good.  After seeing this, I'm thinking I will need to repaint the deck.  I was planning on doing that next year, but I may do it this year instead.   You will read more about this later.  I will have Marco start on pulling the chain-plates one by one, and filling the depression in the deck here which would tend to collect water, and then remounting these chain plates and rebedding them.  I don't want to remove too many of these at once, so I will probably have Marco do them in mirror pairs, two at a time.  So it will be a few hours a day for the next week or so to sort this out.  When finished I can put four pan head screws in the top holes for a finished look.  If they are screwed in to solid fiberglass there will be no leaks.  Last will be painting.  I think a Dremel tool can make a nice flat round corner rectangle with a template for shape, and this will clean up ok.  Perhaps we won't have to paint the decks just yet.  I have one other modification I want to do before painting the decks.

Electric Halyard Winch

Electric Halyard Winch:

I carefully measured before drilling this hole.  There is also a slight radius increase near the top of the flange, so I had to bevel the top of this hole to get the power winch, a Lewmar 44 Ocean Series winch, to lay flat.  I was able to find two of the needed bolts to secure it, but there is no rush as I may need to modify the winch drive shaft to mate up to the gearbox.  Note the thickness of the fiberglass.  There is over an inch of solid fiberglass, a layer of wood and then more fiberglass.  The later two layers could have been skipped as the top layer is very strong.

Here it is in place but not bedded in and mounted.  Of course we had a fe major rain storms and it leaked.  I was originally going to put this on the port side, but changed my mind as this puts it over the gally sink and away from a head butting location.  Believe it or not, this winch required 110 Amp breaker and 1/0 wire to feed it.  I bought a 100 Amp breaker and will need 19' of wire to serve it.  List price on the wire is $7.20 per foot.  I am hoping I get a good discount on that price--it is a bit steep.  My cost will be about $200, I'm guessing for the wire alone.  I also have a relay and a deck button to control it.

Here is my snag.  I can mount the winch to the top of this winch (top side of the gear box opposite the flange, but then I could only access it from the top. I don't want to cut a big hole in the deck.  The flange on the bottom has a whole pattern 3.5" across which does not match the winches 3.25" hole pattern.  My friend Karl is drilling new holes and tapping them with 3/8-16 threads.  Also I will need a 7/8" spacer to drop the gear box down to avoid cutting into the underside of the deck.  I will have to make a fiberglass cover to hide this ugly thing too. 

The wires shown are for a thermal shut down switch, which is wired in series with the relay control switch.  There are three contact poles, I will only use two of these as this winch will only operate in one direction.

I am looking forward to putting someone up the mast is 75 seconds.  It will be an easy two man job to send someone to the top of the mast, instead of an ordeal using normal winches, or a slow climbing procedure with prussic knots.  This is important, as previously mentioned because I have several tasks to do requiring going up the mast in the near future.