I just bought a 1975 DE 38 General Forum Forums

You should be able to remove the worst of the rot and then treat whats left with a penetrating epoxy to stabilize it and then maybe filling with a thickened epoxy to rebuild the shape. If the rot extends a fair distance into the bulkhead say a couple inches or more you could cut out the damaged area and then splice in a new piece of plywood. You should post some pictures. In some areas you could have bit of rot that doesn't affect it structurally at all or it could be in an area that it would cause concern. Those are such large bulkheads that I think you could have localized areas of rot without affecting the boats structure at all. On my boat the bottoms of the bulkheads are not even tabbed in over the fibreglass pan that the head sits on and the end of the port settee is the same. So any rot in those areas should be easy to treat in place by the aforementioned treatments.

Lucky for us we have pretty much no issues inside the boat like this.  The issues we deal with are scuffs, sun fading and some of the wood being drier than I would like due to not enough treatments with a good teak oil. We have been using a citrus solvent and tung oil over the last couple months to treat the interior teak to get deep penetration of tung oil that builds up till it stops soaking in. At that point it will form a surface treatment.

Bowsprit.. if you have rot in the bowsprit then it will potentially need to be replaced. Limited rot in certain areas can be treated like the bulk heads with penetrating epoxy and then thickened epoxy to build back up. I have heard of people doing this to very localized rot around the bolt holes etc.. however if you have rot that extends down the length of the bowsprit anywhere then it probably needs to be replaced. That or any areas with rot need to be replaced with a spliced in piece that is the full length of the sprit. Again not one of my areas of expertise. I would probably be comfortable make such a repair on my boat but would be hesitant to do so for someone else as I am not an expert in that particular repair.

Building a new bowsprit seems like a fairly easy task though. You would use the old one as a template to draw the lines of the sprit on a large beam and use a circular saw to cut out the rough cut shape. You would probably need to cut from both side to cut through the full depth. You would want a beam with a smooth straight grain. Then use a belt sander with 50 grit sand paper or 36 grit to smooth it down the the final lines. Then go to 80 grit, 120 grit and then maybe 220 grit to finish smoothing it. Drill your holes and shape the end for the iron to go over it. I think I would treat the holes and ends with penetrating epoxy so that it was harder for the spar to soak up water and rot in those areas. Then paint and install.  You can also use thinner planks to laminate a spar also. Our spar is constructed this way though I did not do it. The posts above with the links go to discussions on this. I would probably also do a search on the internet for building spars. The wooden boat forums would probably have some valuable insights also. A lot of the traditional wooden boat guys hang out there and talk about rigging and spars and such.

I have actually though about using a steel tubular section to replace ours with if it ever needed it. I would probably decide which cost less and go that route. Steel is something I am comfortable working in so it wouldn't be a big deal one way or the other. I have seen DE's with both the traditional wood and steel bowsprits.

ok  .. bowsprit backing plates 🙂

I think that is factory as that is what ours is like. It is on my todo list to install backing plates.

Unless the idea was that if the bobstay broke and the rig started to come down that the bowsprit should be able to pull out doing minimal damage to the foredeck so as not to rip a huge hole in it. All the normal stress is supposed to push the bowsprit inline from front to aft. There shouldn't be any lifting forces in normal usage. The bowsprit when pushed back pushes into the sampson posts that are bolted to the chain locker bulkhead.

If you notice in your picture there where the chain comes through the deck. It doesn't look as if they sealed the core where they cut the hole through the deck. That is pretty standard for these boats and I am pretty amazed that they haven't had more issues than they have with core delamination. A testimate to the decent quality materials they had back then. I would take and wallow that area between the upper and lower lamination’s out and remove the core back about a half inch and fill the gap with thickened epoxy to totally seal the core there. The same thing for any bolt through the deck there that you take out. Check for the core being exposed and seal it appropriately if it is.

rot..

that doesn't look bad at all.  If there is still some structural wood left in the rotted areas I would take a wire brush and get rid of the loosest and punkiest stuff and then paint it with penetrating epoxy till it won't soak in anymore. Let it cure and then make some epoxy putty with some sawdust with any teak saw dust or sanding dust to give you a close color and mix in enough after mixing the resin to make it the consistency of peanut butter. Stiff peanut butter. It is a lot of saw dust. probably as much sawdust as epoxy or even slightly more. Before mixing that up tape off the hull and just at the line where you need to fill voids in the bulkhead with this thickened epoxy. use a putty knife to fill it all in good and tight and as it starts to tack up/cure pull the tape to give nice clean lines. You might need to do a very minimal amount of sanding if you get it smooth enough. You could come back in and lay a trim strip of wood over that curve to hide the repair if it doesn't look nice enough after it is finished. I would expect you would need to treat both sides of the bulkhead there with penetrating epoxy and epoxy putty to do the repair. While you have the penetrating epoxy out you might tape and treat the areas adjacent to that also to preemptively stop future issues in case of a leak.

If you don't have enough wood left to give a good support to the epoxy being trowled in then I would suggest cutting out just the rotted area and the using paper or cardboard to create a template of the missing piece of wood and use it to cut out a good piece of ply or solid wood that shape and the correct thickness. Treat that section with penetrating epoxy until it is saturated and let it dry. Then Treat the cut edge of the bulkhead where that piece will go in with the penetrating epoxy also. After it cures you can glue the piece in. If you want extra reinforcement take and lay a strip of 20 oz bi-axial glass cloth in epoxy along the curve of the hull covering the splice so that it comes an extra 3 or 4 inches across the splice joint and past each end about that far. This will require a bit more int the way of cosmetic covering afterwards. For cutting out the bad wood and cutting the plug I would use one of the multifunction vibrating cutting tools we talked about the other day. It will make it a simple and easy job to cut out the old wood in such a tight area and give you very clean sharp cuts.

I would if I was doing it prefer to do the first type of repair rather than replace a whole plug of wood.

for epoxy ... west systems seems to be the name brand go to name.. however I have done a lot with a company called Raka in florida http://www.raka.com . their prices are pretty good and you can get great deals on Fiberglas on there closeouts section for small jobs and such. I just tried to check their website and it isn't coming up.. not sure what the issue is there but you can try and see if you can get through. I found them to be really helpful over the phone. If you order from them or west systems or anyone else you want to get one of the pump systems that you can do measured pumps of material into your mixing container. It helps a lot giving accurate measurements. I found order a two to three gallon kit of epoxy though pricey to be a better value over all. I think I got my cost per gallon down to about 60 dollars a gallon.  I have also ordered from http://www.aeromarineproducts.com/ in San Diego CA before and their products worked well. For you guys there in California if your close enough to pick up it would save a lot of shipping charges 🙂

Whatever epoxy you end up getting take and mix up a small test batch and play with it before doing a serious project. Take and paint a scrap of wood with it after mixing it and then take the rest of your test batch and mix in sawdust to get a feel for how much you need per volume to get it to different consistency. It will also give you an idea how long you will be able to work with it before it hardens up.

You can use vinylester resin and fiberglass a lot cheaper than epoxy but I have always used epoxy for the extra edge in strength of repairs and bonding to whatever I am repairing. Just a personal preference.

diverchick71 said:

Scot you're a wealth of knowledge.:-). Trav sent me pics of our bowsprit today and it's not rotten,actually wood feels sturdy but it's seperated from the long post that extends (sorry I'm new to this…the post that extends off the bow that the bowsprit is bully around.). Is that fixable?). I can't upload pics…I'm on my phone. Didn't bring a laptop with me because I'm just working all the time.

Btw brief topic drift..did you install your Nature's head in the yard or on water?

Both Peter and I live in Nor Cal…HOWEVER…due to prior commitments I am down in SoCal frequently until November. (Northern California and Southern California are like different countries. Seriously.:-) How much are we talking about saving in shipping? I could certainly pick some stuff up and haul it back when I happen to drive.

Im not sure I follow on your bowsprit. I think if you could post a picture of what your talking about I might be able to think of something.:) It sounds as if your saying your bowsprit is laying flat on deck but I can't tell for shure. My bowsprit does not touch the deck at anypoint. There is a spacer a couple feet from the bow and then a thinner spacer under the aft base. I think they did this so it wouldn't hold water between it and the deck which would promote it rotting.

Natures head.

We installed in the water…No biggie.. there is nothing about it that requires the boat to be out of the water. We just bolted it with the supplied mounts to the platform the head had been on and ran the air exhaust up to the dorade opening in the head compartment and replaced the cowl on the dorade with a 3 inch nicro day/night solar vent. The exhaust hose we just bolted to the forward bulkhead along the outboard corner of it and once it got to the overhead did a section over to the supplied plastic mount. We just screwed that mount to the bronze fitting for the dorade that was inside the boat. Not sure how your boat was setup but I'm sure you will be able to do something similar easily. I had originally planned on running the exhaust aft and out a raised fitting there but did the quick and dirty just to get it working. I had thought there might be odor issues with the exhaust on the forward deck there but it has never been an issue. Even if hanging out on deck beside the solar vent. The total installation only took a a couple hours the way we did it, add another few minutes for the solar vent installation.

On shipping.

If your more than a couple hour round trip and were going that way anyways I probably wouldn't bother. Figure shipping at about 40 to 50 bucks probably. maybe less since your in the same state.

diverchick71 said:

EXCELLENT question and I will await the response. I've heard the extra chain in the chain locker significantly affects the sailing performance and people keep it midship but my question is where?

It would be difficult to do that on our boats. there is the upper and lower chain lockers and I try to keep most of my chain in the lower chain locker to keep the weight low. I personally think the weigh on this particular boat needs to be forward though just to balance the boat. It is hard to feed the chain into the lower locker. You need someone below to to feed it as someone brings it in from on deck with the windlass.

I plan on one day putting a 3 inch pvc pipe in that runs straight to the lower chain locker and second deck pipe on port that I can run my second anchor line,that is 3/4 inch 3 strand with about 50 ft of chain on the end,into the upper chain locker. This will put most of the weight low and let me store both rodes in the chain lockers without getting them tangled in each other.

If I could have anything I wanted I would get an anchor puller for my second 3 strand and chain anchor rode. This just spools it up on spool with an electric motor and it sits in its on housing on deck just forward of the forward cabin. However they are close to 3 grand so not on my horizon unless I get lucky for Christmas.:)