Hello!
My recently acquired H306 has a lovely dinette table in the cabin - I'm sure you're familiar with it. Closer examination showed that it is mounted to a steel plate, which is in turn welded to the top of a steel sleeve around the compression post. A second steel plate welded to the bottom of said sleeve supports a storage box. Presumably, this storage box is supposed to add additional support to the table, because otherwise I would imagine the torque exerted by the weight of the table on the screws would be overwhelming.
The attached is a diagram to illustrate my problem.
The problems I see and need to fix are as follows:
1) There is about an 1/8" gap between the bottom steel plate and the bottom of the box causing the screws between the table and top steel plate to separate.
2) When converting to a bed, the table sits on the settee before the metal sleeve is all the way to the bottom of the post, again causing torque and screw stripping/table separation.
In an attempt to fix this at least temporarily, I inserted a few joining biscuits (1/8"-thick pieces of wood or something available at Home Depot) between the box bottom and the bottom steel plate. Seems to have helped a tiny bit, but does nothing about #2 above.
I'm just curious if anyone has run into this on their boats. I would imagine it's not specific to the 306. Since the screws will no longer really grip the table I think I'll need to drill all the way through and use nuts and bolts. Not as pretty, but should at least hold the bloody table to the steel plate.
...unless, that is, someone has sage advice on this matter?
Thanks very much in advance!
Nico
My recently acquired H306 has a lovely dinette table in the cabin - I'm sure you're familiar with it. Closer examination showed that it is mounted to a steel plate, which is in turn welded to the top of a steel sleeve around the compression post. A second steel plate welded to the bottom of said sleeve supports a storage box. Presumably, this storage box is supposed to add additional support to the table, because otherwise I would imagine the torque exerted by the weight of the table on the screws would be overwhelming.
The attached is a diagram to illustrate my problem.
The problems I see and need to fix are as follows:
1) There is about an 1/8" gap between the bottom steel plate and the bottom of the box causing the screws between the table and top steel plate to separate.
2) When converting to a bed, the table sits on the settee before the metal sleeve is all the way to the bottom of the post, again causing torque and screw stripping/table separation.
In an attempt to fix this at least temporarily, I inserted a few joining biscuits (1/8"-thick pieces of wood or something available at Home Depot) between the box bottom and the bottom steel plate. Seems to have helped a tiny bit, but does nothing about #2 above.
I'm just curious if anyone has run into this on their boats. I would imagine it's not specific to the 306. Since the screws will no longer really grip the table I think I'll need to drill all the way through and use nuts and bolts. Not as pretty, but should at least hold the bloody table to the steel plate.
...unless, that is, someone has sage advice on this matter?
Thanks very much in advance!
Nico
