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.