My sons $1 Dollar sailboat, gets a re-fit.

[TomY]

5 years ago, while our son was in college in Rome, I sprung for $1 to buy him an old boat. SKAL is a 60's vintage O'Day Outlaw. A Philip Rhodes CCA era design, it's strongly built in a no-frills way. The most important thing to me was that it sailed. Knowing Young Tom is a natural sailor, he'd enjoy it. And I knew this sort of boat, stoutly built and designed for the sea, would get he and his friends home after they go - who the hell knows where - out on Penobscot Bay.

For a couple summers he sailed the dickens out of SKAL, often with several friends and his sister, Mary Jane.

We soon found out, SKAL had a fatal design flaw. Everytime it rains, the bilge fills with rainwater. Not just a few drips here and there (oh,....those are here and there as well), but so much rainwater that if a good downpour hits and drops 1 to 2" of rain, the deep bilge fills and floats the sole boards in the cabin. I know this because I would pump that bilge many times when he had returned to school overseas in the fall.

I won't go into the design details yet but suffice to say, SKAL is a hard boat to love.

Enter the great pandemic of 2020. Our son is working remotely, out of Boston, right across the street from where I sit. He has old friends around here and they stay in touch daily on devices and get together often.

Harry (red hair) is a best friend and I think of him as another son. They both grew up sailing and on the water.

Harry had a dollar boat but couldn't find a place to keep it last year so he lucked out and Y took it for their annual Boat Auction(the Y still owns it,...).
They both decided to pool resources and after work, they're putting some serious work into SKAL. I haven't seen any of the carnage yet but the boat is in a DIY boatyard just down the road. Young Tom sent me a text last week:

Hey dad!

We were looking up on the internet to find ODay restorations

And the first post we found was from you Hahahaha!

Both my son and daughter refer to the sailing forums I post in, as "Dad's chat-rooms". Hahaha!

They and their friends don't even use Facebook, their generation finding their own social media world long ago. I wonder where their sailing forums are? Hmm,...

So we're all pretty on the excited the family text thread, to see the boys going hammer and tong on the old boat.

Young Tom and I are texting back and forth, sketching schematicals and sending on phones, on installing some plexiglass they bought at HD over the holes in the house.

Typical old beat up and neglected old boat stuff. He's asking me a minimum, as I would expect.

Dad's can bog you down with too many details and probably advise more work than you need to, 'git er' done' (I was a son once).

Here's Harry deep in the re-fit:

I'm a proponent of simple battery maintenance: Charge it in the fall and forget about it. My son is taking that philosophy to a new level:

<iframe src="SKAL battery maintenance from Tom Young on Vimeo" width="640" height="1138" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="

">SKAL battery maintenance</a> from <a href="Tom Young">Tom Young</a> on <a href="Vimeo: Watch, upload, and share HD and 4K videos with no ads">Vimeo</a>.</p>

 

[dlochner]

I think it is time to upgrade the electrical system, starting with the battery.

 

[rgranger]

I am most impressed by the potato gun....

 

[TomY]

I am most impressed by the potato gun....

I recall they referred to it as a vegetable delivery system to the mainland.

 

[TomY]

I think it is time to upgrade the electrical system, starting with the battery.

I told them don't throw it out yet. If it was charged when the boat was laid up,...it might still be good.

 

[walt]

LOL.. that looks like a great potato gun and some grand mischief happening in the picture.. The boat they are aiming for probably has fond memories of those boys also (he he..).

 

[rgranger]

I recall they referred to it as a vegetable delivery system to the mainland.

I wonder if it could be repurposed during this "social distancing" time in our history.... Get your "take out" shot up to your 5th floor Manhattan appt.

 

[rgranger]

Here is a prototype

 

[TomY]

I think it is time to upgrade the electrical system, starting with the battery.

That would be,...prudent, Dave. But forget all that. This is a dollar boat. These boys have sailing in mind, ASAP. This re-fit will be brief, but I hope, effective.

I dropped everything for a couple hours and helped carve out some new fixed ports.

My son is a numbers guy and had a formula he worked out on his phone for expanding the trapezoid shape onto some plexiglass the boys picked up at Home Cheapo. For the curves, I suggested some round shape might fit. I grabbed a plastic tape box with a bunch of screws in it. He laid it in the corners, it was about a perfect radius. We were off and running.

I did some cutting on the table saw; handed the blanks to him on the bandsaw. We were in production:

Meanwhile, the other half of the re-fit crew spent the day in the boatyard, scrapping and sanding the most offensive flaking paint in the cabin.

Harry's girlfriend, the most handy of that crew (she works with her sister in the family copper roofing - yup, it's a different world), is leading the charge in the boatyard.

Our son sent this to the family text of the newly sanded sole Across Ediths truck:

I texted back: "Unbelievable, the last time I saw those, they were floatin' in the cabin." That was a fact.

 

[dLj]

Harry's girlfriend, the most handy of that crew (she works with her sister in the family copper roofing - yup, it's a different world), is leading the charge in the boatyard.

Thank god for the changing world! Just a couple tid-bits. The first computer programmers were women - there's a documentary somewhere on that, don't recall the title. Circuit board assembly work is done almost exclusively by women as they have the needed manual dexterity required for that work and hands small enough to get it done. I teach a fair bit of welding, the best tig welders tend to be women. I'm not sure why that is, but seems pretty much how the students work out.

Looks like those kids are going to get to the bottom of the problems in that boat and will make it a lovable boat.... The old O-Days are darned tough boats!

dj

 

[rgranger]

The first computer programmers were women - there's a documentary somewhere on that, don't recall the title.

Hidden Figures... great movie

 

[DArcy]

Hidden Figures... great movie

And the very first computer programmer was a woman - even before computers had been invented!

Remembering Ada Lovelace, the First ‘Computer Programmer’

In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computer that existed only on paper.

www.mentalfloss.com

 

[TomY]

The danger for all dollar boats is to get put in the 'back row' of a DIY boatyard(we're there). This is a hospice for boats back here, most never get out of the back row,...not in one piece.

I was impressed with the progress with weekend 'scrapping party'. I suggested 4" rollers, tipping brushes and acrylic enamel for everyone's health. This may be about all the prep the glass will get (but I will push for a little sanding). Don't forget, this is a dollar boat.

We're going to have to think differently as the field of dollar boats grows.

I volunteered myself. I'll attempt to solve the freshwater(rain) sinking problem this boat suffers from.

 

[dLj]

I volunteered myself. I'll attempt to solve the freshwater(rain) sinking problem this boat suffers from.

Good luck with that. It's either blatantly obvious, and you find it easily; or terribly cryptic and you won't really know until you gone through a few rain storms... I think I've only ever had the first case happen once in my boat fixing experience... I have found a good garden hose and two people to be helpful.

dj

 

[Hunter216]

I volunteered myself. I'll attempt to solve the freshwater(rain) sinking problem this boat suffers from.

I was going to suggest an automatic bilge pump but then I remembered the video of the battery so forget I mentioned that!

 

[TomY]

Good luck with that. It's either blatantly obvious, and you find it easily; or terribly cryptic and you won't really know until you gone through a few rain storms... I think I've only ever had the first case happen once in my boat fixing experience... I have found a good garden hose and two people to be helpful.

dj

I think I know where the water is coming from, it's fixing the problem that is the mystery. Several years before we acquired the boat, after a heavy downpour I noticed the yard was patrolling boats in the harbor. They tied up to SKAL and you could see the bow was pointing skyward. I didn't pay much attention but I did take this pic:

The first season we owned the boat, after a particular rainstorm, I found a few hundred pounds of rainwater settled in a watertight bulkhead area between the quarter berths and the lazetette.

We drilled some limber holes in the center-bottom that allowed rainwater to drain through the V along the bottom into the deep bilge which is near the center of the boat. With this 'improvement', the boat would at least settle into the water on it's lines when it took on deck water.

SKAL has an enormous cockpit, full 8 feet in length. Great for a bunch of sailors and also a large catchment for rainwater. There are two large cockpit drains forward to drain the well. But the seat deck level is even larger. To compound that, the seat level cants down outboard for comfortable ergonomics.

There is a drain gutter formed in the fiberglass along the base of the coaming. A nice idea to keep the seats dry in a spray. Each side has a scupper drain. But that drain is pathetically small.

Here's a close up of one of these tiny hopeful drains. Can you see it? Hahahaha, that will never work, any plumber would know.

Further: the seat lockers have a gutter around the lids. Because the seats cant back, the gutter isn't really deep enough to carry rain water into the cockpit well (which drains nicely). So the builders, knowing the locker lid gutter drains are ineffective, installed another of those tiny hopeful drains, in the gutter, here, in the low spot of the gutters:

All this hopeful plumbing is tapped in below decks here:

I had instructed my son to replace these too small hoses a couple seasons ago. All this helped but only marginally. A good 1 to 2" rainfall would require at least 10 minutes of pumping a small Whale gusher bilge pump to clear the deep bilge.

The one bright spot is that Rhodes designed in nice deck drains. They drain through the large diameter stack you see above where the wonky deck drains are tapped into. These were typical in the early fiberglass boats. They required a lot of labor to fabricate and fiberglass into the hulls. They drain the decks through drains during rain or spraying seas. Unlike a simple (and much cheaper) notch in the toe rails, they don't leave stains on the topsides as they drain an inch below the water line. My old Alden has 4 of these deck drains.

Here's the deck drain on SKAL. Foolproof, big grate in the deck and large diameter piping that can't clog.

I plan to try to enlarge the 4 too small drains and lines, that are a bit less than 3/8" at the fitting openings, to at least 5/8" or better, 3/4".

This could be tricky as the areas are U shaped and hard to work from above and below. West G/Flex is reported to have good adhesion to plastics with proper prep. I may be able to install off the shelf fittings.

My guess is that Philip Rhodes had a more successful design on paper and perhaps the builder changed to the smaller drains. These probably work in a perfect world but one of the worst mistakes you can make in plumbing is going too small on drain lines.

 

[TomY]

EDIT: I forgot to mention how I believe this all fails in a rainstorm.

Once enough water falls on deck, the large catchment area overwhelms the tiny drains. Water collects on the big cockpit benches, along the back of the seats.

The weight begins to sink the stern; just a bit.

That stern-down angle, is just enough to sink the aft channel of the seat gutter drain to the point, the water overflows the seat drains, and heads below.

When this happens, enough rain can easily flow over the gutter channel and drain below to float the sole boards in the cabin. A torrential rain could sink the boat, I'm sure.

If you wanted to spend a rainstorm in this locker, I suspect you'd see a waterfall coming from this low corner - right here:

 

[Will Gilmore]

The cockpit scuppers in the O'Day Mariner are also small and forward in a large cockpit. The Mariner's community is always complaining and coming up with ideas for fixing the problem. Among the ideas I've read about and thought about are the addition of aft scuppers that drain through the transom. The only problem with that is the cockpit sole is pitched slightly forward. However, if you add to instead of replaced the current setup, as rainwater started to weigh the stern down, the change in pitch would allow the water to drain from the transom scuppers until the pitch returned to normal and the forward scuppers could finish the job.

My solution will be to cut large scuppers into the sides of my CB trunk and drain into there instead. I figure the trunk scuppers will also give me a window of access to the CB so I can re-thread the lift cable or see what position it is in.

-Will (Dragonfly)

 

[TomY]

The weekend refit - at pandemic distance - goes on outdoors on one of the first warm spring days.

My input was to glue down some veneer on the sole, the plywood finally dry after removal from the boat.

Having raised a couple directly, and dozens indirectly, nearly all the typical millennial cliches I've heard(read), have proven to be false(IMO).

Millennials are a different generation for sure, but it's too early to tell how those differences will change the world (or not).

They are capable; the old finish on these berth fiddles didn't stand a chance.

I've seen countless people come and go in a life of building. I enjoy watching them; their innate skills or lack of, to see what happens.

'Doing things' comes easily to some, not so much with others (I've had both kinds work for me).

Obvious to me, Edith couldn't wait to dip a brush into the can of varnish. She was on a mission with a goal in mind.

Not her first time with a paintbrush, as she brushed the first coat on her hard work she said, "This is so satisfying". But she knew it would be.

 

[jon hansen]

you say you have heard allot cliches that are neg. is that a maine thing? i'm not hearing these things in my travels here in the mid west.