I JUST BOUGHT A 15 YEAR OLD, 23FT. HUNTER SAILBOAT AND I'M LOOKING TO REPLACE & MATCH THE TEAL/BLUE COVERS ON 2 OF THE CUSHIONS. IS THERE A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN BUY THE SAME MATCHED FABRIC AS THE EXISTING CUSHIONS OR AM DESTINED TO REPLACE ALL THE CUSHIONS? ALSO,THE EXISTING CUSHIONS HAVE A MUSTY SMELL TO THEM DISPITE SCRUBING THEM WITH A CARPET CLEANER,FOUR BOTTLES OF FABREZE AND SOAKED IN SUN SHINE. ANY IDEA HOW TO GET THE MUSTY SMELL OUT?...THANKS, RAY K.
REPLACEMENT CUSHION COVERS
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Getting the Funk Out
Try washing the cushion covers in a commercial washing machine at a laundromat. Another poster recommends using a commercial dry cleaner (he used a firm called chem dry that charged $120 for all the cushion covers on the entire boat and they are sparkling clean and no funky diesel smell either!) I have to repost this great story by Joseph O'Conner from the C27 list about cleaning cushions, it is truly hilarious!!!.. *********************************************** When I got my boat it had a very strong odor, not unlike the odor one might get by mixing motor oil, gasoline, sour sewage, and that certain smell a deep sea tackle box develops after a few trips -- dissimilar metals evaporating mixed with salmon egg oil and rotting chum. When I'd come home from the boat my wife would catch a whiff of me and shout "BILGE!" After I got the odors in the boat under control by using a mixture of bleach, powdered laundry detergent, and water, I tried to size up the situation. Whenever someone mentions boat cushions on this list, three people immediately get into a debate over just exactly how much the Catalina factory charges for replacement cushions. I see that mechanism has already sprung into place, and now you have the figures about replacing the cushions. If I had $1200 or whatever to spend on my boat right now I'd haul it and do the bottom, cutlass, through hulls, transducers, etc. Of course I'd also need another one or two BOAT units to complete that. So... no buying cushions for me. After the sorely needed bottom job I'll be painting the rest of the boat, rebedding all the hardware, and then replacing the sails. THEN I'll buy all new cushions... and promptly sell the boat. Replace the cushions? Tut-tut, I said to myself. How hard could it be to clean the cushions? The PO had replaced the main cabin cushions with very nice four inch foam jobs covered in velour Sunbrella in navy blue with little gray flecks. I think it's one of the official Catalina fabric patterns, I've seen it in ads for other boats. On the cushions where I could get the covers off, I went to a local laundromat and washed them in those giant industrial washers with regular laundry detergent. I also added that oxywhatever stuff you can get at the 99 Cents store for a buck or at the supermarket for $8.95. I realized that I was taking a chance on this process, but I was willing to ruin the covers rather than live with the stench. Next, while the covers were off, I turned my attention to the foam. This is where I caused myself some grief. I almost always do this sort of thing on almost every project -- I start thinking. And then I get into trouble. The principle behind this is "Cogito, Ergo Tsurris!" This is a Latin/Yiddish phrase that may be translated as: I think, therefore trouble! I had been hearing on the C-27 list about people washing their foam, laying it out in the driveway, squashing it flat with a piece of plywood, and running it over with a vehicle to squish out the water. Works great, they said. Mmmmm... The covers, I line dried. They came out smelling better, probably way better than they did before the wash, but I was a bit disappointed that they still smelled a bit like they did when I started out. Then I laid into the foam, four inch thick foam of a very nice density. Thick and dense foam. What I did was I got a bathtub filled partly with very hot water, threw in some powdered laundry detergent and that oxy stuff for a nice bubble bath, and then squashed the cushions in there until they were filled with that very hot wash water. They are big pieces of foam. Wet, they get very heavy. I wrassled them, I swore, I grunted, I sweat like a pig (do pigs actually sweat? note to self: find out from a distance), I tore my fingernails, I gouged fingernail marks into the foam. And then I did each and every foam piece that way for a wash cycle and a rinse cycle. The wash water turned bright green when I got the foam good and soaked with wash water. It was sort of alarming. I pressed ahead anyway. Both the wash and the rinse water were black with extracted soot when I got the foam out. That foam was filthy. I took the first piece of foam out to the the driveway, I flopped a piece of plywood onto it, and I stood on it. As I rocked the board back and forth I got trickles of water out of the sides, but not much. I took a car and rolled it up onto the board. I got out, expecting to see a gusher. Not a trickle. In fact, I think that the foam sucked the water that was already out, back in. Did this foam have an event horizon? Was it a very weak black hole? I rolled the car off and took the foam to the brick patio and lined up all the pieces against the house, standing them on end. And then I proceeded to dry them for three months. Now's the time to point out that I did this in the fall of last year. There are really only two seasons here. Summer, and Not Summer. You can always tell when it is Not Summer. Folks sort of just sidle up to you when you meet them, sigh a bit, and say "Well... it's Not Summer anymore." And that's when you know it's Not Summer. Coming originally from The East, I was sort of at a loss as to what the difference between Summer and Not Summer was when I first got here in the 1970's. Now I know. You see, we don't have winter clothes here. We only have summer clothes. The only difference is, in the winter we wear ALL of our summer clothes at the same time. So, the foam was drying in the yard, and the covers were hung up airing out in the garage. I'd turn the foam each day and check it. After a few weeks the exterior of the foam was dry to the touch, but if you put the foam on the ground and put a knee into it your pants would be soaked. Back to the drawing board. I got my wife's drying rack, a few chairs, enlisted a yard table or two, and got the foam up in the air and drying out. After a few weeks of that I tried the knee test again. Still soaking wet inside. BTW, I had to put the foam inside the garage during the night, and then put it all out in the yard again each day due to dew. D'oh! Then the inevitable happened. It never rains in Southern California. Everyone knows this. I remember one seven year period when it didn't rain, not one drop, never. That fateful day I put my foam out on my drying racks, and went out to the car to go to work. As I got in the car I did happen to notice the big black roiling clouds filling the sky from horizon to horizon, but I passed it off. Someone must be filming a feature near here and they're doing a cloud scene, I thought. I was half way into my 35 mile commute when the sky burst and everyone skidded to a halt. One tenth of an inch of rain here equals seven feet of snow in Syracuse, NY. The roadbed instantly becomes a slippery slide as oil film and discarded Slurpee juice comes up out of the concrete and onto the surface, people panic, and trucks and cars hydroplane in the spots where the drainage is blocked or the road lies too poorly for runoff. Some cars just shut down. Some drivers get out of their cars and run, weeping and gnashing their teeth, flinging themselves over the side of the freeway in a death leap so as to avoid the threat of sustained bad weather. That would be when the rain lasts a day or two. I had one young woman who works for me tell me that she was deeply depressed by the bad weather when it had been OVERCAST for three days in a row last Not Summer. A weather caster on TV once intoned: "Drizzle continues to pound the Southland, will it never end?" I hope he was joking, but no one here would know it was a joke even if it was. It gushed rain. I was way past the point of returning home to rescue the cushions. I was resigned to either paying for new foam or buying all new cushions from the Catalina factory, whatever turned out cheaper. When I arrived home that night I faced foam that was soaked on the side that had been up, but the foam was so dense that it was only soaked on that upper half. Curious. Then my wife stepped in. By this time I was at a loss as to how to dry the cushions and I said so. Since it was Not Summer my wife had been running our giant billion BTU furnace that pushes hot air through actual ducts throughout the house. We have one of only two houses in Southern California that have been set up this way. Forced air heat is unheard of here. Normally, heat is obtained by using a small hall heater or a floor heater. One per house. The traditional hall heater puts out, oh, around 12 BTU's. You have to be standing upwind of it to get a hint of heat. And don't worry, there is most definitely an upwind side to stand on. Southern California houses are not sealed against the elements. They are not insulated, either. Wind comes howling through the house at all times -- except when it is 117 degrees outside. Anyway, my wife set up lawn chairs in our bedroom and in our office and put the foam on them. The forced air heater has no humidifier attached to it, so it dries everything to a crisp, most especially my skin, which burns like fire while the heater is on, and the heater is on half the year in our house. My wife first invokes the heater whenever she notices that it is Not Summer any more and she turns it off when it is Summer again. This means that she uses the heater just like she did when she lived in Joliet, IL, when she was young and carefree. That is, before she met me. During law school she lived in San Francisco where it is cold in the Summer and hot in the Not Summer. Go figure. After that, the foam dried completely in about two weeks. It was odd living with it like that, but I guess you get used to anything after a while. When it was dried completely I assembled the cushions and put them back in the boat, and you know, they don't stink now. If you hold one up to your nose and give it a good sniff you can barely detect that old BILGE smell. All in all, except for the $3,000 worth of labor I put into the job, I'd say that it paid to wash my cushions. Joseph 1977 C-27 #3489 "Surprise" South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club Marina Del Rey, California
Try washing the cushion covers in a commercial washing machine at a laundromat. Another poster recommends using a commercial dry cleaner (he used a firm called chem dry that charged $120 for all the cushion covers on the entire boat and they are sparkling clean and no funky diesel smell either!) I have to repost this great story by Joseph O'Conner from the C27 list about cleaning cushions, it is truly hilarious!!!.. *********************************************** When I got my boat it had a very strong odor, not unlike the odor one might get by mixing motor oil, gasoline, sour sewage, and that certain smell a deep sea tackle box develops after a few trips -- dissimilar metals evaporating mixed with salmon egg oil and rotting chum. When I'd come home from the boat my wife would catch a whiff of me and shout "BILGE!" After I got the odors in the boat under control by using a mixture of bleach, powdered laundry detergent, and water, I tried to size up the situation. Whenever someone mentions boat cushions on this list, three people immediately get into a debate over just exactly how much the Catalina factory charges for replacement cushions. I see that mechanism has already sprung into place, and now you have the figures about replacing the cushions. If I had $1200 or whatever to spend on my boat right now I'd haul it and do the bottom, cutlass, through hulls, transducers, etc. Of course I'd also need another one or two BOAT units to complete that. So... no buying cushions for me. After the sorely needed bottom job I'll be painting the rest of the boat, rebedding all the hardware, and then replacing the sails. THEN I'll buy all new cushions... and promptly sell the boat. Replace the cushions? Tut-tut, I said to myself. How hard could it be to clean the cushions? The PO had replaced the main cabin cushions with very nice four inch foam jobs covered in velour Sunbrella in navy blue with little gray flecks. I think it's one of the official Catalina fabric patterns, I've seen it in ads for other boats. On the cushions where I could get the covers off, I went to a local laundromat and washed them in those giant industrial washers with regular laundry detergent. I also added that oxywhatever stuff you can get at the 99 Cents store for a buck or at the supermarket for $8.95. I realized that I was taking a chance on this process, but I was willing to ruin the covers rather than live with the stench. Next, while the covers were off, I turned my attention to the foam. This is where I caused myself some grief. I almost always do this sort of thing on almost every project -- I start thinking. And then I get into trouble. The principle behind this is "Cogito, Ergo Tsurris!" This is a Latin/Yiddish phrase that may be translated as: I think, therefore trouble! I had been hearing on the C-27 list about people washing their foam, laying it out in the driveway, squashing it flat with a piece of plywood, and running it over with a vehicle to squish out the water. Works great, they said. Mmmmm... The covers, I line dried. They came out smelling better, probably way better than they did before the wash, but I was a bit disappointed that they still smelled a bit like they did when I started out. Then I laid into the foam, four inch thick foam of a very nice density. Thick and dense foam. What I did was I got a bathtub filled partly with very hot water, threw in some powdered laundry detergent and that oxy stuff for a nice bubble bath, and then squashed the cushions in there until they were filled with that very hot wash water. They are big pieces of foam. Wet, they get very heavy. I wrassled them, I swore, I grunted, I sweat like a pig (do pigs actually sweat? note to self: find out from a distance), I tore my fingernails, I gouged fingernail marks into the foam. And then I did each and every foam piece that way for a wash cycle and a rinse cycle. The wash water turned bright green when I got the foam good and soaked with wash water. It was sort of alarming. I pressed ahead anyway. Both the wash and the rinse water were black with extracted soot when I got the foam out. That foam was filthy. I took the first piece of foam out to the the driveway, I flopped a piece of plywood onto it, and I stood on it. As I rocked the board back and forth I got trickles of water out of the sides, but not much. I took a car and rolled it up onto the board. I got out, expecting to see a gusher. Not a trickle. In fact, I think that the foam sucked the water that was already out, back in. Did this foam have an event horizon? Was it a very weak black hole? I rolled the car off and took the foam to the brick patio and lined up all the pieces against the house, standing them on end. And then I proceeded to dry them for three months. Now's the time to point out that I did this in the fall of last year. There are really only two seasons here. Summer, and Not Summer. You can always tell when it is Not Summer. Folks sort of just sidle up to you when you meet them, sigh a bit, and say "Well... it's Not Summer anymore." And that's when you know it's Not Summer. Coming originally from The East, I was sort of at a loss as to what the difference between Summer and Not Summer was when I first got here in the 1970's. Now I know. You see, we don't have winter clothes here. We only have summer clothes. The only difference is, in the winter we wear ALL of our summer clothes at the same time. So, the foam was drying in the yard, and the covers were hung up airing out in the garage. I'd turn the foam each day and check it. After a few weeks the exterior of the foam was dry to the touch, but if you put the foam on the ground and put a knee into it your pants would be soaked. Back to the drawing board. I got my wife's drying rack, a few chairs, enlisted a yard table or two, and got the foam up in the air and drying out. After a few weeks of that I tried the knee test again. Still soaking wet inside. BTW, I had to put the foam inside the garage during the night, and then put it all out in the yard again each day due to dew. D'oh! Then the inevitable happened. It never rains in Southern California. Everyone knows this. I remember one seven year period when it didn't rain, not one drop, never. That fateful day I put my foam out on my drying racks, and went out to the car to go to work. As I got in the car I did happen to notice the big black roiling clouds filling the sky from horizon to horizon, but I passed it off. Someone must be filming a feature near here and they're doing a cloud scene, I thought. I was half way into my 35 mile commute when the sky burst and everyone skidded to a halt. One tenth of an inch of rain here equals seven feet of snow in Syracuse, NY. The roadbed instantly becomes a slippery slide as oil film and discarded Slurpee juice comes up out of the concrete and onto the surface, people panic, and trucks and cars hydroplane in the spots where the drainage is blocked or the road lies too poorly for runoff. Some cars just shut down. Some drivers get out of their cars and run, weeping and gnashing their teeth, flinging themselves over the side of the freeway in a death leap so as to avoid the threat of sustained bad weather. That would be when the rain lasts a day or two. I had one young woman who works for me tell me that she was deeply depressed by the bad weather when it had been OVERCAST for three days in a row last Not Summer. A weather caster on TV once intoned: "Drizzle continues to pound the Southland, will it never end?" I hope he was joking, but no one here would know it was a joke even if it was. It gushed rain. I was way past the point of returning home to rescue the cushions. I was resigned to either paying for new foam or buying all new cushions from the Catalina factory, whatever turned out cheaper. When I arrived home that night I faced foam that was soaked on the side that had been up, but the foam was so dense that it was only soaked on that upper half. Curious. Then my wife stepped in. By this time I was at a loss as to how to dry the cushions and I said so. Since it was Not Summer my wife had been running our giant billion BTU furnace that pushes hot air through actual ducts throughout the house. We have one of only two houses in Southern California that have been set up this way. Forced air heat is unheard of here. Normally, heat is obtained by using a small hall heater or a floor heater. One per house. The traditional hall heater puts out, oh, around 12 BTU's. You have to be standing upwind of it to get a hint of heat. And don't worry, there is most definitely an upwind side to stand on. Southern California houses are not sealed against the elements. They are not insulated, either. Wind comes howling through the house at all times -- except when it is 117 degrees outside. Anyway, my wife set up lawn chairs in our bedroom and in our office and put the foam on them. The forced air heater has no humidifier attached to it, so it dries everything to a crisp, most especially my skin, which burns like fire while the heater is on, and the heater is on half the year in our house. My wife first invokes the heater whenever she notices that it is Not Summer any more and she turns it off when it is Summer again. This means that she uses the heater just like she did when she lived in Joliet, IL, when she was young and carefree. That is, before she met me. During law school she lived in San Francisco where it is cold in the Summer and hot in the Not Summer. Go figure. After that, the foam dried completely in about two weeks. It was odd living with it like that, but I guess you get used to anything after a while. When it was dried completely I assembled the cushions and put them back in the boat, and you know, they don't stink now. If you hold one up to your nose and give it a good sniff you can barely detect that old BILGE smell. All in all, except for the $3,000 worth of labor I put into the job, I'd say that it paid to wash my cushions. Joseph 1977 C-27 #3489 "Surprise" South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club Marina Del Rey, California
R
river
Replace Foam is the only way to go
A boat that old is bound to be in need of new foam. You might as well go all the way and get thicker foam if you are going to replace the covers. Foam is easy to cut with an electric knife and you can glue peices together if you need longer or wider pieces. Link below for foam and glue.
A boat that old is bound to be in need of new foam. You might as well go all the way and get thicker foam if you are going to replace the covers. Foam is easy to cut with an electric knife and you can glue peices together if you need longer or wider pieces. Link below for foam and glue.
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