“Twostepsforward…”

114 TOM O’NEIL Tom O’neil continues his mission to save Grace, the 32-foot Hartley launch that had looked like a bargain, but was more like a DIY nightmare.

Iwatched as my builder Carl ripped off parts of the superstructure with his bare hands. While salt water can help preserve wood, fresh water rots it and, without regular maintenance, Grace had developed multiple cavities in which rain water had become trapped. The result was extensive rot.

Carl wasn’t impressed. Every problem, it seemed, could have been avoided if it had been fixed properly when it first appeared, rather than a series of piecemeal touch-ups.

“A bit of paint here, a dab of silicone there, but never digging down to find the root of the problem,” was how he put it.

The most frustrating part was that Grace had been reasonably well built and, with regular maintenance, would have remained in fine shape. The bones of the boat were OK; most of the ribs were sound and she was basically good below the waterline.

There were small cracks in the paint on the starboard rails which had sucked in water and trapped it. Over time, movement had opened the cracks further, allowing water to penetrate deeper, expanding the wood and allowing in more water in until the wood was sodden and non-structural. The fibreglass then delaminated from the hull, allowing more space for water, all the while looking sound from the outside.

The starboard side was really rotten. Starting with the hull, Carl pulled out all the rotten wood, leaving a hole 6m long and 1m deep, just above the waterline. The structure was so far gone it would have split down one side to the waterline in a big sea. The repair involved ripping out the starboard deck rail and rebuilding the main supports under the large saloon windows.

Carl replaced parts of a few ribs where they’d rotted at the top and one rib was popped, so he lost the datum for that side. Ribs shape the boat so they need to be right. “It’s now slightly kinked,” he said. Carl used a double layer of 50mm ply about 4m long to bend around the sides of the boat. This gave him a datum line against

which I could shape the new ribs. Wherever he joined new sections of rib to old timber, Carl used splice joints for strength with a hardback – a piece of timber or laminated plywood glued and screwed against one side of the joint for extra strength.

Every day brought more examples of maintenance shortcuts and the use of unsuitable materials.

“Why would you use Michelangelo ceiling tiles?” Carl wondered. “You wouldn’t use them in a bathroom because of the damp so they’re definitely not suitable for a boat. And why would you save a few dollars buying cheap silicone sealer when it’s never going to be up to the task? At least use marine sealants.

“It’s so important to look at old boats from the inside out,” he told me. “The trouble is: you can’t see how bad things are from the outside. Someone needed to take a look from the inside, pulling the lining aside to check the structure underneath, but no one did.”

BUT WAIT...

Grace’s windows were another victim. Typical of old boats, the window beading was wooden and nailed to the frame. Ideally, Carl said, when the beading starts cracking and is lifting off the structure, it needs replacing, with the window frames stripped back and checked for water ingress, not just sanded smooth and repainted. Instead, the windows had allowed water to be trapped between the fibreglass and the plywood hull and decks.

The window frames had been constructed with insufficient sealant or waterproofing. “I think they probably started leaking no more than ten years after the boat was built,”