316L Stainless Steel Replacement

Corrosion: This is what 304 stainless submerged in salt water looks like after a long period of time without a lesser noble metal for protection, namely a zinc sacrificial anode.  This is the lower fitting on the rudder (actually shown upside down from how it is attached) that connects the rudder to the skeg.  I now am paying the price for not keeping the zincs where they should have been!  The oval hole actually was not originally present.  That is how much metal was eaten away.

Less corrosion: these two views above of the rudder pintle show how much corrosion occurred while not always submerged.  Not as bad as the first two pictures, but still there is damage.

READY FOR WELDING (ALMOST)

New Stainless: two new pintles will be made of 316L stainless steel which is higher in corrosion protection, but still will need a sacrificial zinc for the parts that are submerged.  I bought a special band saw blade to do the cutting of these parts.  It was laborious and slow at times but nothing like as slow as it would have been if it had all been done with a hacksaw. The blade for the band saw was expensive but worth the cost.  I was amazed how well it cut through this hard stainless, as long as I took my time and did not force it.

OLD GUDGEON

Never submerged, this gudgeon survived for over thirty years in remarkably good condition. All the rudder  units are being fabricated in 316L SS and will be protected with zinc anodes. Here are the pre-fabbed parts for one of them, plus another angle of the old 304SS gudgeon:

TOO COLD TO WORK RIGHT NOW

It is a cold night here in western Oregon in late February, heading down to the mid teens for a hard freeze, perhaps beating the record low of 18 degrees F set in1962.  The outlook is indicating a low of 13F tonight. Already we are down to about 25F and the coldest part of the night is just about sun-up.   It is too cold to do any work in the unheated garage, so most of the efforts toward the refit are currently limited to digging for relevant information on-line.

A key decision to be made soon is about the winches.  ETAK originally had four Barient 21 standard manual winches for both primary and secondary positions. These 21's may be all right as secondaries, but I am concerned about this size for the primary winches.  The other big choice relates to whether to go to self-tailing or not.  Jim Brown still espouses using non-self-tailers on his designs.  Yet, I see a number of Searunners with self-tailing winches.  Without the need to tail, cranking in on a genoa sheet is certainly much easier and probably preferred by my first mate.  But rapidly dumping one is the big issue.  I need to go out on a few more vessels with --tailers and see how fast I can toss off the wraps.  Cleating off is another matter.  Brown likes to use cam cleats, then move the sheet to horn cleats.  Releasing a cam cleat under heavy load can be quite difficult unless one takes a bit of a pull on the winch, and with the urgency of releasing the sheet in a sudden gust, such a tactic can be slow at best.

The other big issue is cost!  The larger the winch, the higher the price!  New ones don't come cheap, and going up one size larger increases the cost significantly.  As I write this, there is a pair of new Harken B44.2STA winches on Ebay with a minimum bid of $1750.  The best retail price I can find is about $1300 each for this winch.  So far, no one has bid on them, and they would represent a substantial savings over buying two at retail, and that is a delivered price.  Hutton-Arco winches from Australia are another option.  They can be bought for about $1780 for a pair of 40 ST's , plus shipping, and the company will take a trade in of my old ones. But the 45ST Arco winches are closer to the Harken 44's and these Arco units cost $2240 a pair, plus shipping.  Yikes! Anyone reading this with any experience with the Hutton-Arco winches?  Andersen 40 self-tailers run about $2534a pair from Defender, plus shipping.

It will take a big chunk of change to upgrade winches in any case.  Maybe I will just put the old Barient 21's back on and see what comes along down the pike (or, seaway).  Hmmm... Choices and decisions.

Paint helps!

"After" and "Before" shots of the front half of ETAK as seen from the first spreaders.  Not showing is the gray primer that is under the first coat of the white primer.  It was hot working on that gray in the sun! It also kicked off the white quite quickly giving me precious little time to even the coat out.  In the picture above, you can see it is a first coat where the roller has not had a second pass over it.  The gray shows through quite well through this thin first coat.  Subsequent coats will even out the white so it is uniform.  This Z-Spar two part epoxy primer is excellent to work with (except for the fumes), and sands nicely once fully cured.  The gray was actually the same paint; I just added some black tint to it.  That dye is worse than Never-Sieze!  If you just look at it, it gets on your hands, tools, clothing.  Because I was not concerned about a match with the gray, each batch had a slightly different amount added to it, so the gray varied in darkness.  We really looked like a botched Navy pain job!

What a lift it gave us both to see some paint on the old gal.  All those weeks of sanding, filling, sanding, and more filling were getting to us.  So putting a bit of color on to hide the body work sure did lift our spirits. Here are some other photos taken during the painting spree:
https://picasaweb.google.com/rannmillar/ETAKRefurb#

Wet Locker Hatches

The time-consuming rebuild of the wet lockers and hatches is progressing nicely, thanks to the diligent efforts of my first mate.  She has laboriously touched up the edges of the hatches while I have been adding the bog to the edges of the lockers themselves.  The fit is really quite nice now.  Take a look at this photo to see how clean the fit line is.  Once we get the two part primer on, all the blotches of color disparity will disappear and we won't be looking like a botched camouflage sea-battle vessel.