Here's the deck with most of the hardware removed. Even if the holes were okay (which it was on the anchor roller), I'm going to wait months before filling them in hopes that moisture will escape from all of the openings.

I was able to get a moisture reading well away from the leaking deck fittings when I drilled a hole for the gas tank deck fill. This shows that the balsa core is saturated throughout the boat. The wood looks perfect, but it probably would not have lasted long at this moisture content.

It still gets bored out to help dry out the boat and get a protective epoxy coating in the future.

The bow light was okay because of a big gob of caulk.

Here's the deck with most of the hardware removed. Even if the holes were okay (which it was on the anchor roller), I'm going to wait months before filling them in hopes that moisture will escape from all of the openings.

Here was one of the leaks. The cleat was set in silicon bath tub caulk, which can work okay if there is no pressure placed on the fitting. Wait a minute. Oh yeah, it's a cleat. This will have to be bored out and filled with epoxy. I found that a "file card brush" was aggressive enough to remove the caulk and not damage the deck.

I drilled them out oversized so that they could be filled with epoxy putty for a proper deck mounting. The swarf looks good, but it was soaking wet.

Moving on to other deck penetrations, these are the holes that hold the helm bulkhead in place. They didn't appear to have leaked, but the pulpit mounts forward had leaked and the core was saturated.

M

Here's the deck with most of the hardware removed. Even if the holes were okay (which it was on the anchor roller), I'm going to wait months before filling them in hopes that moisture will escape from all of the openings.

Marco Flamingo
Oct 29, 2015

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