Persistence

Persistence pays off in the end, if you don't give up too early.  This is one of those cases...

Remember this post?  In it I talked about using aluminum tape to seal the top of the mast boot to the mast proper...

When it was new

Backspacing at least 10 years, we have been dealing with intermittent leaks at the mast partners.  Each thing that we have done has improved the situation... but the leaks, tho diminishing in quantity and in frequency, have persisted.  Replacing the mast boot, resealing the deck ring, and finally replacing the deck ring altogether with a composite material that won't absorb moisture and consequently change shape and break the seal have all helped.  But even after all this, there was still the occasional drip coming down the mast in heavy rain and wind. (OK, maybe I am a little anal retentive here...)

Looking up from inside revealed that the water was not coming in at deck level - hooray!  That leak is stopped!  Instead it was coming from higher up.  The only place where it could be originating was at the seal between the top of the mast boot and the mast.  However, a brief inspection (because it was raining) did not disclose any flaw there.

But.  The water simply had to be coming in there.  So I pulled the hose clamp off to get a closer look at things.  Lo and behold, the aluminum tape was just plain gone under the hose clamp!  Galvanic corrosion between the stainless in the hose clamp and the aluminum tape ate the tape, and created an opening for rain to find its way in. 

There are two lessons here.  First, galvanic corrosion is evil.  And just as importantly, frequently corrosion is hidden.  Both very much worth remembering.

The fix was easy:  remove the offending hose clamp (it really was overkill anyway - the aluminum tape is more than sufficient to hold the boot up), and apply a fresh layer of aluminum tape.

Persistence

Improved Deck Ring

Eolian's deck ring was not molded into the deck because the Downeast 45 was sold with three different rigs: sloop, ketch (Eolian), and schooner.  Because each of these rigs required a different mainmast location, it was impractical to make three different deck molds.  Instead, the deck ring was fabricated from two pieces of teak and bolted to the deck in the appropriate position for each rig.  

But there has been a persistent deck leak originating between the deck ring and the deck proper.  Various attempts to seal the deck ring without removing it had been problematic, working for a while and then the leaks returned.  Eventually, I pulled the ring up and resealed it with butyl rubber. And then there was the little problem at the joint between the two pieces of wood where apparently a piece broke off of the cross-grain at the end, leaving a gap which was filled with a glob of caulk.  In the reseal, I at least used a small piece of teak for the bulk of the required filler. 

But even this was not a complete success.  I speculate that the wood would grow and shrink with moisture, working the seal.  The answer was obvious:  replace the wood with something which was impervious to moisture.  I used Trex composite decking, obtained as a scrap from a neighbor's deck replacement project.  I carefully traced the outline of the wood pieces onto a piece of paper, including the holes for the mounting bolts, took this paper home and relayed the outlines of the two pieces onto the Trex and bandsawed them out.

 

 

I made the outside edges a little rounder than the teak versions because the hose clamp that holds the mast boot to the ring did not apply sufficient pressure to  the straight sides of the original ring, allowing wind to blow rain up under the boot - thus the foam tape applied to the outer surface. 

 

 

(The mast wedges bear on the deck edge, not the deck ring)

In the final installation (also bedded in butyl rubber), I also applied foam tape to the edge, just in case my "rounding out" the straight edges was not quite sufficient to make a tight seal.

This should last forever.
 

Improved Deck Ring

Partners

Looking up at things

For several years now, Eolian has sustained a small yet nagging intermittent leak at the mast partners - where the mast penetrates the deck.  After several failed attempts to locate the leak or to pre-emptively stop it, I removed the interior trim and examined things from below, while it was raining.  And leaking.

I was relieved to see that the water was...

• not coming down the mast, which would indicate a leak at the top of the boot - one of the places I have very carefully examined several times, and
• not coming out of the foam deck coring, which would mean a wet deck.  Whew!

Instead, the water was appearing at the joint between the deck ring and the deck.  Tho I have repeatedly attempted to seal between the deck ring and the deck externally, it has never been rebedded.

Removal of the mast wedges

So I pulled up the boot and started the removal of the deck ring. I had thought it was a complete ring, but soon found out it was two half-rings, each held in place with three screws.  Well, not quite.

Half the deck ring is off

On the port side, the ring was less than a half, by about 1/2".  Apparently the end of the ring broke off, either in fabrication or during installation.  The pieces were cut from a teak plank - they were not laminated.  At the ends, the grain runs across them, and it is easy to see how an end could have been broken off.  What is a little more difficult to understand is that the installer solved the problem of the missing 1/2" of deck ring by simply filling the gap with what, I surmise, was a giant blob of polysulphide.  Now, after 39 years, it was as hard as a rock.

And so was the sealant that was between the ring pieces and the deck.  I had not given much thought to this, but the mast wedges driven in do bear somewhat on the deck ring.  And as a consequence, the rock-hard "sealant" broke loose from the deck instead of flexing.

Thus leakage.

Add a strip of 1/8" thick white butyl tape

After everything was dried out, I wiped things down with paint thinner and allowed it to evaporate off.  Then I applied strips of 1/8" thick white butyl rubber tape to the underside of the ring pieces.  I then screwed things back in place.  A couple of revisitations to the screws were required as the butyl continued to squeeze out of the joint.

Gap filled

The problem of the missing 1/2" of teak I solved by trimming down one of the wedge pieces and driving it into the gap (lined with butyl tape), and cutting it off flush.

Handy stuff

The final step was to line the complete outside of the ring with some self-adhesive aluminum-backed insulating foam tape, meant for preventing condensation in air conditioners, etc.  On the sides, where the boot hose clamp has little clamping pressure (the mast cross section is rectangular with rounded ends), I applied multiple layers so that the hose clamp would have something to bear against.

Does it leak?

Never thought I'd say this... waiting for rain.  To see if it leaks...

Partners

Singing the praises of aluminum tape

What keeps a tape from being permanent?  Two things:

• The substrate does not survive contact with moisture or sunlight
• The adhesive fails, usually due to exposure to sunlight, and dries out or crumbles

That should tell you why I like the aluminum tape you can buy at big-box home supply stores like Lowes or Home Depot. 

Look for it in the insulation aisle

The substrate is actually metal - it's aluminum - thin enough to stretch a little and to easily conform to almost any shape.  And because it is metal, no sunlight - zero sunlight - penetrates the substrate to attack the adhesive.  The metal is polished and apparently anodized - it survives years of exposure to sea air without a blemish.

And the acrylic adhesive they put on this tape is some of the most aggressive I have seen. And because it is protected, it is as easy to remove tape that has been in place for years as it is to remove newly-applied tape - the adhesive does not get hard.

Here are a couple of examples where this marvelous stuff is in use on Eolian:

• 
  Sealing the top of the mast boot. The tape adheres tenaciously to the mast, forming a permanent water-tite seal, and it conforms nicely in the task of overlapping the mast boot fabric. The hose clamp  serves to mechanically hold the boot in place - not to create a seal.
• 
  Sealing the joint where the two ends of the extrusion come together on our windows. When they came from the factory, there was an internal seal, but I had to destroy this to replace the glazing. The tape is a permanent cover for the joint.
• 
  Protecting the PVC used to make the new wind vane
  

Singing the praises of aluminum tape

Gotcha.

Today there was a most important convergence: It was not raining, and I was home while it was light. So I took another look at the mast boot.

Having given up on everything else, I cut a new one. Because I had the old one, I didn't have to go thru the patterning exercise - I just traced the old one onto the Naugahyde and cut it out. But first, of course, I had to pull the old one. It was instructive.

Here's the inside of the old one, showing clearly where water had been coming in. (Because of the way I laid it out in the cockpit, that's the bottom of the boot at the top of the picture.)  There are a couple of (dried) streams to the left in the picture, and one gigantic wet stream to the right of center in the picture.  When it was installed, this was at the back, where the sail track is on the mast - a tough place to seal.

The smoking gun

And look what I saw when I turned up the edge and looked closely at the boot where it went over the track.  Yep, the vinyl coating on the fabric had cracked, twice.

Some interesting gel-life growing inside the old boot

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Update:

Looks like someone is running a hose
on the deck above, doesn't it?

And wouldn't you know?  Mother Nature delivers a test storm not long after I get the new boot installed.  Perfect timing... and it's not just any storm - in fact it is a deluge of Biblical proportions - any minute now I expect to see pairs of animals lining  up out there on the dock.  It's been going on now for 24 hours, and there is no end in sight.

So far?  One drop. 

Yeah.

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Update #2:

Sunny and dry today (but cold).  This allowed me to inspect the new mast boot more closely than I was able to during and immediately after installation.  What I found was incomplete adhesion of the polysulphide I had used to seal the seam where the ends overlapped on the boot.

Drop explained.

And fixed.  (Replaced the polysulphide with 3M 5200.)

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Previous post in this series.

Gotcha.

Barking up the right tree?

Over the years that I have chased deck leaks, I have learned one thing: before I tackle a major rebedding project, I try to find out if I am barking up the right tree. That means that I should find a way to make an easy, tho likely temporary, seal in the suspected area before tackling a full-on rebedding.

That diagnostic temporary seal has taken many forms over the years, tho most frequently it has been blue tape.  In approaching the possibility that my mast leak is actually between the deck ring and the deck, I had another option.  Earlier attempts at sealing the top of the boot required me to peel off the 1" wide "self-bonding" silicone tape (in quotes because it really didn't do it all that well).

I had saved that tape, intending to reapply it later.  But it was a perfect medium for creating a diagnostic seal at the base of the mast boot.  I removed the base hose clamp, and formed the tape so that it went up over the boot and ring, and then splayed out on the deck, creating a skirt around the deck ring.  (It's kind of hard to see in the picture above, but the two ends of the tape are directly beneath the hose clamp screw.)  Re-attaching the hose clamp completed the diagnostic seal.  Total time invested: 5 minutes.

This is not a permanent seal.  Nor is it really waterproof - water can likely sneak under the skirt.  But the skirt should serve to divert 90+% of the water coming down the outside of the mast away from the area between the deck ring and the deck.  If the water flow down the mast inside shows a significant decrease at the next rainstorm, I've nailed the location, and I need to get out the polysulphide.  If not, well then it is time for re-thinking.  And the blue tape.

Such is life aboard.

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Next post in this series

Barking up the right tree?

The saga continues

Any boat has deck leaks.

Every boat has deck leaks.

Any boat that doesn't currently have deck leaks, is just between leaks.

For the past several years, Eolian has been leak free.  But not now.  All my efforts to date to seal the deck penetration where the mast goes thru have been to no avail.  And now that it gets dark so early, it is not possible for me to carefully examine things when I get home from work.  The examination needs to be careful and detailed.  Because an amazing amount of water can come in thru the tiniest of holes.

To date, I have been focusing on the joint between the mast boot and the mast.  At the next opportunity (Friday morning, if it isn't raining) I will redirect my efforts to the deck ring where the bottom of the boot attaches.  I will pull up the bottom of the mast boot and check to see if the deck ring itself is serving as the entry point.

That's the plan.

If it doesn't rain.

Life on a boat is like this.

The saga continues

Oh no!

Just when I was feeling all smug and superior, here comes a drop of water down the mast.

Now I will have to wait until the rain stops to investigate why the seal isn't working.  And who knows when that will happen...

Oh no!

Seems easy, right?

 I mean, how hard could it be to keep rain water from running down the mast and into the cabin?  You make a mast boot, and seal it to the mast - probably using one of those jumbo-sized hose clamps as the final measure.  No leaks, right?

(BTW, being able to take this picture with the huge range of brightness between the sun-drenched mast outside and the shadowed mast inside is provided by a function called 'High Dynamic Range', part of the free - or was it 99¢? - iPhone app 'Top Camera' - I recommend the app for this capability as well as many others.)

Well, no. Despite all the measures, a recent rain revealed that I still have work to do here.

The picture is a little vague, but if you squint, you'll see those brown marks that show where water has snuck past the seal somewhere and run down the mast.  The brown stain is coloration leached from the teak wedges which hold the mast in position at the partners.

So I disassembled the seal I had built before.  Here's what I found:

• First, the silicone tape, tho it had bonded very well with the hose clamp, had not bonded well to the mast
• Next, because of the poor seal of the silicone tape, the long duration 3M tape underneath had turned to water-saturated mush.

After removing both, I applied a wrap of adhesive-backed aluminum foil (sold for sealing duct work) over the joint between the boot and the mast.  The thinking here is that the aluminum tape will not turn into mush on contact with water.

Finally, I re-applied the silicone tape, because it looks better.  (I hope I don't regret the decision to do this.  I am concerned about the paint bubbling up where moisture was trapped.  We'll see.)

Seems easy, right?

A Little Early Spring Fitting Out

I completed three little projects this past weekend:

• All winter long, the wind blew. And the inner forestay hummed and vibrated like a guitar string. Apparently due to some weird kind of musical convergence, this vibration causes the turnbuckle holding the stay to unwind. Last spring, when I re-tensioned the rig after installing the new bowsprit, I installed cotter pins or keepers on all the turnbuckles in the rig to keep this from happening. Um... well, except for the inner forestay, that is. Oops. I re-tightened the turnbuckle, and this time I put on the keeper rings.
• Our VHF radio is capable of including our location as a part of an emergency broadcast... if only it is told where we are. And we installed a new GPS last year, which is capable of telling the VHF our location. All that was missing was the 25 feet of wire between the two devices. This weekend, I bought some 2-conductor shielded microphone wire from Radio Shack and used it to connect them. The only hard part was routing the wire - that took an hour and a half, or about 0.28 ft/min.
• At the top of our mast boot, I used to seal the boot to the mast with special, long-exposure tape from 3M. This stuff was expensive, and had an outer coating of aluminum powder to resist UV damage. It worked great. But, of course, it is no longer available (at least at the places I have looked). So, at the Boat Show, I found some self-bonding rigging tape. This silicone-based material supposedly welds to itself after being in contact a little while. So I bought a roll and used it to seal the mast boot - it looks very nice, being white, with the white mast and white mast boot. We'll see how it stands the test of time. (This reminds me that I had planned to blog about how to cut a mast boot which will fit both the mast and the larger deck ring, and fall in a smooth line between them. OK, noted - it's now on the list. Done.)

A Little Early Spring Fitting Out