Kinship has been “in the shed” for a few weeks and work has been progressing. The focus was to get all the fibreglass repairs done while the boat was indoors and not dependent on weather. This is also the stage that Dixon was doing most of the work. Dixon has done a fine job of filling and repairing the wounds left by the removal of the radar and wind generator towers along with assorted other small parts that were no longer needed.
The keel repairs have been completed. As I mentioned, we had some cracking of the fairing over the keel joint, seen above. The fibreglass was detached from much of the area of the joint and was not doing much. The crack in the keel fairing is a few inches below the actual joint. I am not sure why this happened, a mix of water getting in and a freezing and some movement in the joint.
We pulled out the holding tank and this revealed the lack of plates under the aft keel bolts and some minor stress cracks in the paint. The rest of the keel bolts have plates. I ground away the paint in the keel sump, the cracks did not penetrate the structure at all. The sump was reinforced with 6-8 layers of 18oz glass and epoxy. Over-sized 3/8 stainless plates have been installed to spread the loads. The sump and the connection to the keel is now stronger and stiffer.
I bought a borescope to allow me to check that I had access to all the keel bolts, in this configuration, there are no bolts under the fuel tanks.
From this:
To this:
The new laminate spreads the load to the sides of the sump and to the aft floor (in a boat the floors stand vertically and provide strength to the bilge).
The keel joint has been redone, with flexible resin to increase the life of the joint. The actual joint between the sump and the keel looked fine with no sign of movement.
If this was a race boat I would have faired the rest of the keel, but this is our house, I don’t need an extra 0.1kt.
Kinship is in the process of being moved outside, so the next stages will be weather dependent. The first order of business is to truck the boat back to the marina so we can get the arch back on the boat and start the wiring and finishing jobs. We are guessing that Wiarton Willie was correct today and we will be able to get back to work in about 6 weeks.