33.5 Keel Installation

[Brent Headberg]

My 1990 Hunter 33.5 was blown ashore in Hurricane Frances and the cast iron keel was loosened. I have hired a reputable marine contractor to make the repairs, and I am satisfied with his description of how he is going to remove it and re-bed and reattach the keel.Remove nuts and washersUsing extended hole saw to core drill down over the keel bolts clear thru to the keelSandblast keel & seal with West Systems epoxyRe-attach keel with bedding material between stub and keel and pour epoxy in around keel bolts where core drilling was done previously.Installing new washers and nuts and torque.Let me know if anybody has had this done either in a similar manner or something different.

 

[Frank7609]

Better Than Original.

Brent, having reinstalled one of hunters cast iron keels I have the following questions and suggestions. What is the hole saw business about, is this just to clean up some ragged edges? Use a thickened West epoxy as bedding for the keel rather than something flexible. Use some metal plates in addition to washers to distribute the internal nut load over as large an area as possible. I used copper plate 5/16" thick X whatever size will fit. Fasten some flat head studs up from the plates before installing to connect the lightning ground to. Get the biggest breaker bar you can find to torque the nuts. By the way mine is an 88 30 ft. Glad to hear that your damage was not fatal as so many others.

 

[Brent Headberg]

Hole Saw

Hi Frank,The guy removing my keel is using the hole saw to core drill over the top of each keel bolt down thru the bottom to the keel to release the bolts from the hull. He says he's used this method on the big race boats. Re-install requires the cores to be poured back with epoxy to fill in around the bolts after re-installing keel. The cores that will still be attached to the bolts after removing keel will be chipped off the bolts and the threads cleaned.