I've been doing a lot of upgrades on my CAL 25 mkII. One of the nagging issues since I purchased her three years ago has been the condition of the rub rails. Most production power and sailboats use a "shoe box" style of hull/deck joint that used a basically flat rub rail to cover the joint. This type of rub rail is relatively cheap and easy to find. Some boats use an “external flange” style of joint and it is extremely difficult and expensive to find a rub rail to fit. Sailboats such as CAL, Santana, Newport and I believe Crown along with some others use the external flange type of hull/deck. The factory CAL joint uses pop rivets about every 4 inches (100mm for those that are not bilingual) to hold the joint together during manufacturing. The back inside of the joint is then filled with fibreglass and glassed over with multiple layers of glass cloth about 8 inches wide. This makes for a very strong and water proof joint. Essentially the hull and deck become one structure.
The CAL 20 and the classic flat top CAL 25 use a one-piece “C” shaped snap-on rub rail to cover the joint. My CAL 25 mkII and all of the larger CAL’s that I looked at use a two-piece design. The main part was a horizontal "H" shaped plastic strip about 1.75" square that fit over the flange and was held on with glue and screws. The second piece was a semi circular plastic cover cap that inserted into grooves on the outside of the “H”. My hull/deck joint is fine but the 31-year old rub rail was in a very sad state.
I searched the Internet, sent many emails and made many phone calls winter and finally found a solution that did not cost “an arm and a leg”. Actually it cost about ½ of a boat unit. Steve Seal at Seal’s Spars & Rigging supplied a 60 ft long piece of CAL 20 rubber “C” shaped rub rail. I pulled off the old ones, cleaned up the joint and installed the new ones by myself while at the dock in the Nanaimo boat basin one long hot day (it was a 6 beer job) last summer. You need to plan the project and do it on a hot day.
Here is the contact information for the rub rail supplier:
Seal's Spars & Rigging
1327 Sherman Street
Alameda, CA 94501
510-521-7730
http://www.sealsspars.com/gunnelcatalog.html
The CAL 20 and the classic flat top CAL 25 use a one-piece “C” shaped snap-on rub rail to cover the joint. My CAL 25 mkII and all of the larger CAL’s that I looked at use a two-piece design. The main part was a horizontal "H" shaped plastic strip about 1.75" square that fit over the flange and was held on with glue and screws. The second piece was a semi circular plastic cover cap that inserted into grooves on the outside of the “H”. My hull/deck joint is fine but the 31-year old rub rail was in a very sad state.
I searched the Internet, sent many emails and made many phone calls winter and finally found a solution that did not cost “an arm and a leg”. Actually it cost about ½ of a boat unit. Steve Seal at Seal’s Spars & Rigging supplied a 60 ft long piece of CAL 20 rubber “C” shaped rub rail. I pulled off the old ones, cleaned up the joint and installed the new ones by myself while at the dock in the Nanaimo boat basin one long hot day (it was a 6 beer job) last summer. You need to plan the project and do it on a hot day.
Here is the contact information for the rub rail supplier:
Seal's Spars & Rigging
1327 Sherman Street
Alameda, CA 94501
510-521-7730
http://www.sealsspars.com/gunnelcatalog.html