Righting the Rails

Saturday June 27

Northstar Sail Club

We've spent the past few days removing and re-installing the Genoa tracks on the starboard side of the boat.  After our "shake-down cruise", we were experiencing a little leakage especially in the monsoon rains of this past week, and we wanted to head off deck rot.

I didn't take a "before" picture, so these are the tracks on the port side.  The Genny "car" runs along this track to allow adjustments to the Genoa Sail based on wind conditions. (This is so much more refined than the system on the Elemental).

We removed the track and cleaned up the holes. There was a little bit of punky wood, and we cleaned that and dried it out as best we could.  Then we filled the holes with epoxy. After that set, we (and by we, I mean Chuck) drilled holes for the bolts in the epoxy.

Then we applied this cool material (I promise not to chemistry geek out too much) called butyl tape. It's like silly putty (without picking up images) or playdough. It creates a waterproof seal around (for our purposes) bolts and hardware. So we put a layer between the track and the hull and also wrapped the bolts to fill the countersunk holes so that no water could get in.  

The track itself is interesting.  It is a perfectly straight piece of metal, but as you can see in the pictures, it is forced into a curve as it is attached to the hull.  It's kind of like bending ribs for a qajaq. Once in place, we got to "squeeze" the pieces together to form a seal and bolt the tracks back on.


Captain says we're now "one step closer to keeping the water on the outside of the boat"

We got a brief rainstorm, followed by this beautiful rainbow, which I'm choosing to take as a sign that we won't leak anymore.



Our foreman Feather "was not going to be found wanting when duty called.  [She] did not intend to be found at all."-TP (Last Continent) 
This is a Terry Pratchett quote and Twoflower is named after a character in Pratchett's Discworld





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