You may remember we had problems with our chainplates pulling out of the deck when we were in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. If you haven’t seen the episode you can check it out here https://youngbarnacles.com/moving-chainplates/
We had issues with water ingress through the deck at the base of the chainplates. Our solution was to put a bead of sika around the chainplate base and seal the gap between the base plate and the deck. Once we had done this, however, we noticed that the sika was starting to tear. The movement was only small but from that, we ascertained that the chainplates were moving.
As I’m sure you are all aware, chainplates are a critical component in keeping the rig in place, a failure at this point is catastrophic so it was something we needed to investigate further. We had to pull all the lining and internal furniture out of the hull in order to inspect what was going on. Unfortunately, the prognosis was not good. The bulkhead that the chainplate was bolted to was a plywood core and at some point, water had penetrated inside and started to rot the bulkhead. As the damage seemed to be old and the movement we had seen only small, we were left with a decision to make – do we cancel our transatlantic passage and replace the chainplate and bulkheads or do we keep to our original plan and try to cross to the Caribbean? Well if you’ve seen our previous video on chainplates you would already know the answer. We decided the best thing to do was replace the bolts with the correct ones, tighten everything up and keep on our original path to the Caribbean.
Of course, Paikea is a boat and the band-aid fix we administered in Las Palmas is no longer enough to stop the inevitable rot of the bulkhead plywood core. Especially if you are spending time in the tropical Caribbean where rain and humidity are in abundance. Luckily Anna and the kids were able to identify the problem early enough to avoid any serious disasters and sit tight until Shayne had finished his work on a string of Gunboats needing to return to Europe.
So. It’s time to show you how to deal properly with moving chainplates and rotten bulkheads. Sit back and get your boat building geek on for this week’s episode – HOW WE BUILT OUR CARBON FIBRE CHAINPLATES
And remember kids – don’t try this at home 🙂
For those of you curious to learn more, the lamination process Shayne is using in the video is a technique called wetpreg. In this case, the unidirectional fibre is impregnated with the wet resin before applying it to the job. This is to ensure correct fibre orientation during laminating. For a detailed description check out our video below.