Another project that needed immediate attention was the port hawse pipe on Valkyr. I was walking up to her on the dock and just happened to notice that the hawse pipe was about to fall off. So I pulled it all the way off. I thought some of the rest of you would be interested in how the sides of the boat here are designed. It is hollow up in there.
This is a project that needs to be revisited. I found that the holes the bronze wood screws are going into need to be re-glassed and drilled again. (you heard it correctly all that as holding it in is some wood screws. Actually what it needs is not wood screws but machine screws that go all the way through to the plate on the inside and I need to tap threads into the plate and and have the bolts hold them together. Right now I have new bronze screws in place and lots of 3M 4200 as bedding compound. It is working but not as strong as I would like it to be.
While I had the hawse pipe out I polished it up also. here are some before and after shots. I just used a little generic polishing compound and some 3M 1500 grit sand paper. I tried using a scotchbrite pad but it just didn’t get the job done. The 1500 grit got the job done and left a very smooth surface. Smoother than it was to start with.
And here it is installed. I actually had to take it back out after this and turn the hawse pipe over as it it didn’t fit flush to the plate on the inside. You can see this in the picture.
Its been a few months since I did this project and the hawse pipe seems to be holding up to use. I think we can thank the 3m 5200 more than the screws for that. Also the fine polishing job I did is back to a weathered non shiny look 🙂
Maybe polish it and then polyurethane it to keep that shiny look a while longer.
I did the same thing but beware of the fact that the plates aren’t the same dimensions as the hawse part. I shredded a 1″ dock line in a bit of a surge in our slip because the plate wasn’t flush with the hawse tube!
timbalfour
I can see that. We are on a face dock on the Intracoastal Waterway and get a lot of wakes bouncing us around. So far our dock lines have held up to several years of this through the hawse pipe without any chafe gear on them. However I did fix the plate so that it was oriented correctly. The picture of it installed in the post was prior to me taking it off and re-doing it correctly.