Chain Locker Work

For the last two days I've been attending to the leaks in the chain locker, at the bow of the boat.  Jak and I had found out that there was some leaking when the chain locker was filled to the brim with water.

The problem area was at the horizontal edge running along the top of the rear bulkhead, underneath the lip of the opening into the chain locker.  In Hawaii I had attempted to fiberglass up to that edge but about 1/4" of the material had peeled back from the edge, due the effect of gravity.  Wally had shown me how to fiberglass a vertical wall by stapling the matting with stainless steel staples (which I was later able to pull out), but I'm not aware of any technique for getting the wet matting to hold position around a top edge. 

The "easy" fix was to empty a tube of 5200 sealant along the entire edge, but I figured that doing this would preclude the possibility of using expoxy in that area in the future.  I decided to use my stock of West System 105 expoxy resin, 206 "slow" hardener, and 405 filler to create a paste that I could apply to that edge, filling in the cavities behind the fiberglass, and hopefully getting a good enough radius on the edge to allow fiberglassing.

The sun and heat on the deck would be a problem so I was up at 5 AM yesterday and was on the boat at 6 AM, after first light but before visible sunrise.  Working underneath the lip was a challenge, but I did a reasonable job, using two batches of 6 oz of paste.  The paste kept trying to drop down and I kept pushing it back up with metal spoons and a paint scraper until the mixture had set enough to hold itself up.  At 11 AM I found that the mixture had set pretty well and the deck was still remarkably cool.  So I mixed three "mini" batches of 1 tablespoon of hardener to 5 tablespoons of epoxy, and filled in remaining gaps.

I was back on the boat at 6 AM today and had a go at fiberglassing the edge using 2" wide lengths of matting.  Unfortunately that failed because the wet fiberglass would simply not hold position long enough for the resin to set.  I abandoned that and used filler to thicken the expoxy resin into a paste and filled in any suspicious areas.

The result of the work is not neat and pretty, but on the other hand the only way to see it would be to stick one's head inside the chain locker and look up.  The important thing is that I am confident that the leaking from that area has been stopped.

I'm glad that's over.