Re: [ADV] Re: [WillardBoatOwner] caprail sealing
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Here’s a few responses rolled into one. Seams: I’m never happy with the look of BoatLife seam caulk, but it does a good job of sealing. I just wish I could sand it after the fact (nope). Attached is a picture of the seam on my caprail. If you zoom in you can see how rough the seams look. Granted, I applied the sealant and trimmed it off during a rainy weekend, so things could have been different. [The more time I spend with my yellow caprail the happier I am about it. I can’t say I’ve pulled off a Mediterranean look (there’s a lot of grey on the boat) but it’s quite jaunty, especially with the black seams. Just sayin’.] I widened the existing seams using a box knife and small eyeglass screwdriver sharpened into a chisel. The teak is pretty shot after 40 some years and is very easy to cut. My advise is don’t try to “split” the seam - leave one existing edge and cut the trough into the opposing piece. It’s slow and laborious work, but not technically very difficult. Use the box knife when you are cutting against the grain (at the turns of the joint), use the “chisel” with the grain (cutting perpendicular to the grain on the long run). Leaky fittings: You can almost never trace a leak from where you see it in the boat to where the water is coming in. However…I have found three particularly pernicious leaks just by looking up under the caprail after soaking the boat. The source of the leak was the screw that had a drop of water hanging off its underside. One of these was a cleat fastener, but two where from bunged screws attaching the caprail to the hull/deck joint. I sealed these by removing the bung, removing the screw, duct taping the underside, then replacing the bung - sans screw - with a lot of thickened epoxy (the duct tape to keep it from leaking out). I then replaced the caprail fastening screw a couple of bung’s distance away from the original. The cleat I removed, then did the epoxy/bung thing, then replaced it in a different spot. Ultimately I moved all the cleats and stanchions to a different location because I didn’t like where they landed. Sometimes the move was small, but it allowed me to epoxy bung all the old holes and start fresh with new sealant. Old caprail compound: On Moonlight I don’t think it’s dolphinite, but after all these decades who knows what dolphinite looks like? Under the stem fitting it was hard and brittle with little or no adhesive quality. It was also applied very thick - over .5”. (See attached photo.) It almost seemed like whatever marmoleum is made of. So maybe dolphinite is a good guess.  
On May 27, 2021, at 5:07 PM, HALLIE DAVID MCCURDI <Davidsailboat@...> wrote:
-- Sean Eamon Kennedy Vega Voyager “Moonlight”
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