| Circe
| Saturday, July 11, 2009 I continued the deck hardware removal stage with the coamings and winches. I'd already removed, on Thursday, the screws securing the coamings, so now I used prybars, a knife to cut the sealant, and my trusty 5-in-1 tool to break the coamings' grip on the fiberglass. They came off without too much of a fight, fortunately, as most of the sealant was along the top edge of the joint between wood coaming and fiberglass cockpit surround. |
|
|
|
Next, I turned to the winches and winch pads. Each side featured a pair of winches mounted to built-up pads, which turned out to be hollow between the two winch-mounting areas. The winches and pads were secured to the boat with long bolts--threaded rods, actually, which featured nuts on both ends. The bolts and nuts securing them were a mishmash of sizes, making removal more frustrating than need be. In particular, I liked the extra-long bolt that had been used on the port primary winch, seen here in an upside-down view from beneath. |
 |
|
After a futile attempt at unthreading the nuts from beneath the cockpit--the bolts spun--I dismantled the starboard primary winch to gain access to the top of the bolts. As I pulled off the winch drum, I heard the pitter-patter of little bearings scattering everywhere: the cylindrical winch bearings, featuring a couple dozen small stainless-steel cylinders secured (or at least formerly secured) within bronze circular rings, had failed. The bronze rings had corroded in place and deteriorated, and this allowed the bearings to pull apart with the removal of the winch drum, scattering the cylinders all over. I collected all the pieces--or at least I hoped all the pieces--and proceeded with the winch removal. |
 |
|
I determined that the nuts securing the top ends of the threaded rods, at the winch base, were impossible to grab with any tool in my inventory, so I resorted to cutting through the wooden winch pad (which I never intended to save or reuse) and, at the same time, through the bolts securing the winch to the pad. I ended up doing this for each of the four winches, since all were installed with similar lack of foresight and were each similarly hostile to traditional removal methods. Even with the benefit of the knowledge of the starboard primary winch's bearing condition, I was unable to prevent the scattering of bearings from the port winch when I removed its drum; if anything, the bearings on this side were worse than the other. Again, I collected the pieces and set them all aside with the winches, and completed the removal of the remaining winches by cutting the bolts as before. |
 |
|
With the winches out of the way, I hammered the remaining bolts through--with surprising difficulty (which only reinforced that the decision to simply cut the bolts had been the right one; they never would have come out otherwise), and pried up the pads to remove them. The wood had rotted where it met the deck, and where it held water thanks to the design of the pads, and left some wood residue behind on the deck. |
 |
|
The termination of my successful removal of the coamings and winches coincided with the beginning of a productive 2-hour meeting with the owner, who drove up to talk about his hopes and plans for the boat, specifically some ideas for the cockpit and interior. For now, I'll withhold the ideas to maintain suspense and interest, but suffice it to say that the entire interior as it currently existed would soon cease to be--in part because of the poor condition (and water-saturated, mold-ridden state) of much of the interior wood, but also because of the plans for something entirely different in the cabin. After the meeting, I cleaned up a bit and called it a day. |
|
|
|
