I'm not really sure how the Teak sliders are attached to the top of your companionway hatch. Mine are attached with stainless steel wood screws. What you need to do is try to find the wood bungs and remove them without marring the holes. In his book, "Boat Carpentry" by Hervey Garrett Smith, Mr. Smith takes a small wood screw and cuts the head off it, and inserts it into an old fashioned wheel type brace to use as a drill bit. I suppose that you could use a small variable speed drill and take it real slow by drilling in the center of the bung. When the screw bit bottoms out on the top of the hidden screw under the bung, the wood bung should come up and out of the hole. I generally go a step further in removing bungs by using a miniature crafting chisel set to carefully clean out the hole.I need to remove my sliding hatch above the companionway so I can replace the teak wood slides that it slides in. Does anyone know the trick to sliding the cover off prior to removing the old slides?
Thanks
Hi Keith!thanks for the correction joe, i think i messed mine up by drilling out the bung first. when i tried to just screw in a screw, most of the time the bung would not break loose, so i used a drill bit to drill them out. why do you cut the heads off the screws, is that just to put them into the drill chuck? Or do you you reverse the screw so as to run it in reverse? seems like there would be an advantage to runnning it in reverse.
Hi Keith!
The guy who wrote the book "Boat Carpentry" came up with the idea of using one small wood screw to remove wood bungs. Yes. he needed to fit the screw into the chuck of one of those old time egg beater type drills. I have one of those on my boat in my tool bag. Anyway, he goes on to explain that if you use the screw as a drill bit like you were going to screw it into the center of the bung, the screw will bottom out on the top of the screw head under the bung causing the bung to lift up. Sometimes this doesn't work and you have to wind up carefully digging out the bung with a miniature chisel. Years ago, my brother Bobby found this old antique chisel set in the barn of his work place and gave it to me. It looks like a fat screw driver with a chuck and the wooden cap unscrews and all the small chisels are inside of the handle. The screw cap has a round metal disk for pound on it with a hammer. I've been using this chisel tool for years. I haven't seen another one like it yet. It was probably used for carving small wood projects.
Joe
Hi Keith!Hi Joe,, i havn't been on the forum in a while. pretty busy with summer, house, and yes, a bit of sailing. Hoorah!
The chisel "kit" sounds pretty neat. I would like to have time to browse through old shops and keep an eye out for those old timey woodworking tools.
hey, last weekend we had the catalina 22 race at our club. alot of boats came from other places. there were about 30 boats in the races. there was a silver, gold, and cruiser fleet. I crewed a silver fleet 22 that live at our club and is captained by a friend named jim.Jim is the current club champ, and has been for the past three years, so it was a blast to crew his boat (or a chore, not sure which yet). ha. It was a perfect race day, with the winds averaging a steady 15 with a few gusts around 22. there was just the occasional white cap unless you caught a gust. they kept that little boat on its side the whole day.!
boy was i running all over that boa;, we would tack and of course have all the hauling and winching that goes with that (watch out for those flying elbows!), then we would crawl to the high side of the boat and hang on the rail for about 10 minutes, then do it all over again. down wind was not much better as i had trouble with the fitting on his whisker pole. he had made a modification the weekend before that, unfortunately for us, had a barb on the fitting that kept hanging up the line....arghhhhh!. anyway, that cost us a little time. Also we missed a start horn and were not in the best starting position on one race. but we still came in second on all three races., we totaled a minute behind the first boat in our fleet.