Morgan Giles rebuild
Planning to cruise in cold climates, Richard Rogers sizes up his Morgan Giles 30 refit task and gets started from the bare bones
A complete overhaul of a 60s classic for colder climates
Rebuilding a yacht from scratch, even a small one, requires at least 2,000 hours of work. That’s a lot. To put it in perspective, that’s a 40-hour week, for 50 weeks, or a whole year’s work for one person, give or take.
The secret of a successful rebuild is to realise and accept how much work it is, and make the time or the money available, or some combination of both. We chose to work with a small yard, J-Star Marine Services, who have been truly great, with the aim of the them doing half the work and us the other half.
With that in mind my partner, Alice, and I went to Essex for several weeks last summer. With help from visiting friends and family (a huge thank you to all of them!) we made a 400-hour dent in the slog. To make the adventure more affordable, given that we live a long way from the yard, we camped for the duration of our stay, which was more attractive than one might expect. The Essex/Suffolk border is Constable country and has some lovely corners for a tent.
Getting to know Aurora
We bought Aurora, a Morgan Giles 30, for a song from a marina who wanted rid of her. She’d been abandoned. The marina even paid for a rigger to get the mast down and a lift-out to get her on her way.
Built in about 1970, and identified as an early version by her wooden coamings, we know little about her.
She’d been raced and more recently lived aboard (judging by the kit we discovered on board), but what we can say for sure is that she has lines to die for – without bragging, one the best designs of that era – and a layout which we’re going to love when we get her under sail.
Her traveller is behind the cockpit out of the way, with plenty of leverage on the boom, and behind that the aft deck is long enough to take the arms of the Aries 2 self steering gear she came with.
Her keel is long too, but cut away (so not too long). The rudder hangs on the aft end of the keel, well under water and protected, where a following sea or a reversed-into wall is not going touch it.
The disadvantage is that the cabin is forward and short, but we don’t mind that. Having given up a 41-footer, compact is part of the idea. We are working to our own design, given the plan to sail her to remote and cold places, a promise which is hard to fulfil without getting bespoke. And bespoke, especially on a modest budget, is another good reason for going small.
Vandalism or restoration?
There are perhaps some who would accuse us of vandalising a classic design, but we don’t see it like that: the Morgan Giles 30 was generally sold as a bare hull for home finishing, so we are only doing what was intended for her.
The concept is simple: we’re reducing her berths from five to three, to make room for more water and fuel carrying capacity. We are also insulating her thoroughly for out-of-season and cold-weather work.
‘The Morgan Giles 30 was generally sold as a bare hull for home finishing, so we’re only doing what was intended for her’
Low temperatures mean we’ll use diesel for both heating and cooking. That’s because there is not enough room for propane gas on a boat this size, which comes in bottles too large. Butane is not much use in the cold.
Other ideas – the sort of things one is unlikely to find on a production boat of this size – include:
a chart table which is just a flat surface (to avoid a lid which spills the navigation instruments everywhere when it is lifted).
A heated towel rail will help us to not have wet towels hanging about.
A big bucket-like storage space will take all the shore gear like tents and walking boots.
An outboard will not be needed if we use an inflatable kayak as a tender.
Rain catchers will collect water from the lowest area of the deck.
And we plan to survive with an icebox instead of a fridge (to save on power consumption) – we are not hoping for tropical weather.
That’s all for later, though. The tragedy of Aurora is that everything made of wood was rotten, except for some minor bulkheads. We needed to take her completely to pieces. But by the time we got to Essex last summer the major demolition had been done. The yard had also opened, resealed and closed the hulldeck joint – which had to be done this time round or never – and much of the work under the waterline was complete.
The challenge for our few weeks away was to attack the pile of key components that must be refurbished or remade, and to get some of the structural basics done.
Key components
We concentrated on a list of timeconsuming and fiddly jobs, reasoning that boatyard time can be expensive: we should try to pay the yard only to do the things we can’t.
We set to work dismantling and refurbishing a wide variety of timber, aluminium and stainless steel components under the guidance of Simon Papendick at J-Star. His patience is remarkable.
Dismantling the aluminium portlights, in particular, was absorbing work. It’s common to discard these and replace them with something Perspex. I can understand why. Some of the screws and smaller pieces needed soaking in diesel for three or four days before they’d budge without destroying them, and cleaning out all the old sealant – both the original dry/
‘Everything made of wood was rotten. We needed to take her completely to pieces’
cracked stuff and the later silicone bodge-repairs – took a lot of time and care. But we think the aluminium looks good and original, and ours came with reinforced glass which we can also re-use.
We now had a large pile of parts ready to go back on, including the tiller, main hatch, handrails, guard rails, stanchions, pushpit and pulpit. I’m particularly pleased with the new handrails, which we made from scratch more or less from a hunk of raw tree.
And all sorts of deck gear like the traveller, genoa tracks, mast step, and bases for the winches and self-steering were cleaned up too. Some dents and scratches remain on some components but Aurora is an old lady and some character will do her no harm.
Reinforcing the stem
To be honest, we didn’t anticipate reinforcing the stem, and we’re not sure it will do much good in a collision, but after a chat with our surveyor we decided the investment of time and money was not that much.
In an empty hull it’s easy enough to do, and once we start building out the interior we won’t be able to access that area of the boat again, so we went for it.
The secret was to measure up the internal angle of the hull at regular distances from the stem head, then transfer those measurements to a long piece of foam and cut it to shape.
A sharp breadknife works well for cutting foam and an approximate fit was good enough: the foam is only to hold up the glass. We used closed cell foam, mainly because we had some. Several alternate layers of chopped strand and biaxial glass mat went over the top.
‘I’m particularly pleased with the new handrails which we made from scratch’
Moving the chain locker
We’re slightly paranoid about chain: experience has made us fearful of not having enough, coupled with a dislike of rope or any mix of chain and rope. But chain is heavy, with consequences for sailing well if placed high in the bow of a small boat. So we re-sited the chain locker lower in the boat than previously and further aft, beneath the bunk in the forepeak cabin.
The order of assembly took some working out because we wanted to make sure the whole inside of the plywood chain locker would be layered with glass so it remains waterproof. It’s going to be permanently wet and cold in there and the plywood needs the protection.
We started with making the aft bulkhead, fitting it temporarily in place with gaffer tape and lightly glued-in blocks.
Next we made the locker top, glassed the underside, fitted it, and tabbed it in on the top side only.
Once the locker-top glass had set, we removed the aft bulkhead, glassed the interior side of it, and set it aside.
We then tabbed in the locker top from underneath, refitted the aft bulkhead and tabbed it in on both sides: the outside is accessible easily, but the inside is accessed via a hole cut in the locker top for an inspection hatch which can be fitted later. That’s awkward, but it’s only tabbing around the edge that’s needed as the interior surfaces have already been glassed by this stage.
Note that our locker top also had a hole cut at the forward end to take a hawse pipe from the deck. This we fitted last, but if we had wanted to glass around the inside end, which probably would have been better, we could have fitted it before refitting the aft bulkhead, while we still had good access.
New floor bearers
We enjoyed this job. It was our first try at shaping plywood to the compound curves of the hull and a small enough job to be quickly satisfying. We also got a sense of making the boat ours as we did this, because lowering the floor is a critical element of our own design. We need headroom for the insulation to come; and, of course, a lowered floor will be narrower, creating extra width either side for increased storage, especially more water tankage and food storage for longer trips.
We made the floor bearers from 18mm marine ply by either tracing around the old and rotten bearers or making templates. We cut limber holes with a large hole-saw before the bearer was cut out of the plywood sheet. Two coats of resin followed, then we fixed them in place with silica and epoxy and two layers of chopped strand mat.
The tricky bit was getting the bearers level with each other. Aurora’s hull was moulded and laid by hand so she doesn’t have the perfect symmetry of today’s
‘The chain plates had had it, rusted through, and the yard had a long struggle to cut them away from the hull’
computer-designed boats. All four bearers were fitted at the same time, joined temporarily across their tops to a nice straight piece of timber which held them both level and upright. Quite a bit of trimming by trial and error was needed to get them right on the uneven floor.
Unusual chain plates
Our chain plates had had it, rusted through, and the yard had a long struggle to cut them away from the hull to which they’d been thoroughly glassed. Fit only as templates, we had copies made. I mention them for two reasons.
Firstly, they are an unusual design, and therefore interesting. They are a double cross of stainless steel, bolted both through the hull and vertically through the deck, and glassed in with alternate layers of chopped strand and biaxial glass. The toe rails fit over the top, all of which should make them immensely strong.
The second reason is that glassing them in was very messy and therefore a lot of fun. Three of us bolted them in place one hot afternoon and then went at the glassing in shorts and respirators, with very little experience of fibreglass and a lot of muffled shouting and laughter. A barbecue and beers followed on a pretty riverbank, which is exactly the sort of life we had in mind for our summer in Essex. As the twilight faded to darkness, a family of swans flapped up the bank and went to sleep almost at our feet.
What an achievement!
We have done 400 hours and we have some extra camping experience to show for it as well. To get our one thousand hours of work in – and probably more – we only have to live the whole adventure another twice or so. We can’t wait.