U-bolts as chainplates
Years ago when I was buyer for Cherubini Boat we sort of stumbled over these U-bolts. They were stainless steel and came blister-packed as ski-boat tow rings, in both 3/8" and 1/2" sizes. And they were cheap. For the C-44 we bolted them through the plywood deck and the heavy fibreglass deck flange (round the edge of the hull) and used a length of 316-SS 2" angle as a backing plate to catch all four bolts at each set of chainplates. We threw away the cad-plated nuts and washers and used proper 18-8 stuff with them. We didn't even care about the 2"-radius of theU-bolts not matching the 9/16 clevis pin of the turnbuckle-- worse coming to worst it would merely elongate a little and work-harden into position (and you'd retune the rig and forget it). I have never heard of a chainplate failure on a Cherubini 44. The best part was this: the 1/2" one (C-44's main chainplate) was safety-rated at 30,000 lbs in tensile. That means that ONE of them, suitably mounted, would hold up the WHOLE BOAT (the C-44 was designed at 29,800). In fact one afternoon we nearly dropped a boat in the shop (a dolly on the the cradle tripped and the boat fell through the cradle to the main beam) and I said, 'Just tie it off from a U-bolt to the building and we'll fix it tomorrow," which we is exactly what we did, using chain and some rigging cable. I think it entirely possible that the use of cheap stainless U-bolts bolted through the aluminium toe-rail, deck, hull/deck flange, and adequate backing plate, by Hunter and then by others as well, may have come directly from the Cherubini Boat practice. This would have been typical of my dad's involvement with both companies and what we, in tongue-in-cheek arrogance, called 'the old Italian ingenuity". In fact it was/is a very efficient solution relying on cheap, existing low-level technology-- a kind of thinking that ought to be the norm, rather than the exception, in today's production fibreglass sailboats. JC
