1990 26S centerboard control line tube/volcano pics?

[texlan]

Hi guys. I just put my '90 26S in a slip at the local lake Pleasant, and am now faced with dealing with something I'd been putting off and was hoping you could help me with it.

I am getting a couple-few gallons of water in the starboard bilge a day. I traced the leak down to the centerboard control line tube/volcano structure out of the CB case under the galley. It appears that one of the two POs attempted a repair to the structure where the PVC pipe is molded into the case using what looks like marine-tex epoxy. This appears to have eventually started leaking again as the epoxy was applied above the white paint without first sanding.. so the water is seaping out between the paint that has lifted and the glass. At this point, a second "repair" was attempted using what looks like strips of bondo brand fiberglass and polyester resin dumped over everything.

Needless to say that abortion was ugly, ineffective and makes an actual repair more difficult.

I am going to need to remove as much of the previous repair attempts as possible, grind/sand down to something I can get epoxy to bond to, find the source of the leaks, and build up a glass/epoxy repair to fix. UNFORTUNATELY.. I can't find any decent high res photos on the net of the "volcano" assembly as it came from the factory. Can anyone take a picture of theirs and hook me up? I want to know if I have hit OEM build as I'm working through this or if I'm still hacking away at bad repair work..

Sean

 

[walt]

This was discussed recently in another thread.. but I had a leak there early this season. What is a little odd is that on the stock design, if the boat has a "normal" weight load, the water line inside that tube will not be high enough to leak out when in a slip. In my case, I would only get the leakage when I was motoring as this would force water higher into that tube. But in a slip.. I would get no leak at all. Maybe someone shortened your CB tube so that the top is below the outside water line even when the boat is not moving?

To fix this, I just added an extra SS hose clamp and tightened all of them. I think mine is mostly stock..

Sumner also posted about this and when he loads his boat for a trip, he has such a load that the boat sits a few inches lower in the water. You can see from my picture that the water line comes near the top so when Sumner has the heavy load, the water line would be over the top. But.. it takes a very heavy load to do that.

Pictures are from a 1990 26S

 

[Joe A]

I put a regular 8 oz tube of sunblock there for perspective. Please excuse my peeling paint. The carpet you see is about a quarter inch thick.

 

[texlan]

I wish it was so simple but I replaced the hose a couple years ago already and have two hose clamps on it, 180' from each other. There is no water seeping from around the hose junction and my water level unloaded is below the top of the tube. The issue isn't the hose-to-tube junction, it's somewhere below that in or around the tube-to-centerboard-case junction. The area depicted in the photos (thank you both by the way!!) is heavily built up with the white epoxy looking stuff more apparent on Walt's photos than Joe's, is actually separating from the floor around the left side of the CB hump and water is seaping out from underneath it. Finding this is compounded by the nasty gobs of polyester resin and poorly dumped fiberglass resin in the area.

I'm going to try to get out to the boat again today and take some photos to convey the gravity of the situation.

 

[walt]

But... that sounds like a fairly easy repair after removing what ever is on there with the boat on the trailer. I think you have the right idea with epoxy and glass.. Built up lamination and it could be better than new. That pipe is something to worry about if you have an unsecured or under secured item like a battery under the sink. Bust that pipe and the boat will fill with water... I only keep light weight stuff in that area..

 

[texlan]

I think you nailed it right there.. I believe the PO kept a lead acid battery under the sink and when I bought the boat from him it was pretty clear that's where he kept the battery. It's also clear he was a car guy, not a boat guy, hence the bondo resin.. I only keep a few tools and spare parts/wire/fittings there now, containerized to secure them and cushion any movement..

I ditched the lead acid and have 8 100ah LiFePO4 cells in series as a replacement, secured under the starboard settee. Lighter weight, more available power, charges faster from the 480 watts of solar... blah blah but this isn't a battery thread.

 

[texlan]

So below is the sad state of my cb control line tube/volcano.. If you look to the lower left in the second pic you will see the white marine-tex like epoxy that was gooped onto the floor, I've already picked at it some and cracked it off...the water is seeping out from underneath it. You can see the mess made by the POs with the shoddy fiberglass/polyester resin dump all over the floor there.. I had already removed some of it as well..

The lighter color is epoxy & some silica that I had coated the tube/top of the volcano with when I replaced the hose, in an attempt to smooth out the jagged fiberglass/chipped paint surface to provide a better sealing surface for the hose/hose clamps when I replaced it a couple years back, not yet realizing that the leak was underneath everything.

train wreck...lol

 

[Doc_holiday]

I suspect I too am getting water in from here. Surely deck fittings and rubrail too. Again this year, my cable broke. I repaired it last year with some "stainless steel cable" from Home Depot. Yeah, that was some high quality stuff! NOT! So once again, I will bunk my boat and slip the trailer out from under and do it again. But before I do, I need to look at this area.

 

[texlan]

Yeah Doc, I plan on replacing the stainless eventually with dyneema, but I am too lazy to drop the keel on land and will dive on it when the water's warmer.

Update, it looks like after a few days-week in the slip, the water's stopped coming in on mine. Ballast tank is noticably down from where I filled it to, it's now about level with the normal top of the ballast tank, not the hump... it appears that the therefore that the leaking water is coming from the ballast tank. Huge relief...thinking that will be much easier to repair as well as soon as I find the leak (haven't yet..)

P.S. I put a Raspberry Pi in the starboard bilge with the Pi Camera, connected to the marina WiFi and made available by dataplicity.com to get real time snaps.. here's some examples, the first one from before the weekend when I last pumped it out with a spare diaphragm pump, and the second taken right now while I was writing this.

Just including this in case any of you could use such a piece of reassurance It certainly lowered my blood pressure to see the leak stabilize below where my automatic bilge pump would have triggered.

I'll update this thread when I do find the leak in case it helps anyone down the road..

 

[texlan]

I just wanted to wrap this up in case anyone has a similar issue. I eventually took very small chisel (read: flathead screwdriver I sacrificed to the cause) and chipped all the previous owner's fails away.. First, the polyester resin, then, marinetex epoxy, then, what looked like 20 year old plumbers putty(!)...

I then took a grinding wheel/stripping wheel on my cordless drill and went to work...

 

[texlan]

It went a bit deaper than that but I didn't get any more pictures prior to the fix, and anyways you get the idea. Pretty ugly. Cleaned the area with acetone, and started by saturating the gaping cavern with some MarineEpoxy brand epoxy. Then layered in 3 layers of 4oz cloth cut to more or less be bias cloth. Let that set up until tacky, built up a dam around the area with my emergency-stop-leak toilet ring wax, and put more epoxy in along with about 6 more layers of 4oz cloth.

It was taking a while to set up so I closed up the boat and the next weekend showed back up to clean up..removed the dam, pseudo-faired epoxy and was left with this:

Which by the way, no longer leaks. I need to clean it up some more and paint the entire area but... my bilges are dry now, ballast is full, and I call this a happy ending.

Thanks to you all for the photos that provided me with guidance to get to original build and everyone's input. It was truely helpful and appreciated

 

[vizwhiz]

This was a great follow-up, and you did a great job fixing the problem. Congratulations!
I'm getting a leak after filling the ballast tank also, so I'll be checking this area when i start troubleshooting.