Where can I get a long core drill to drill around a steel spike in a floor timber?

Discussion in 'Wooden Boat Building and Restoration' started by sdowney717, Nov 12, 2021.

  1. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    Here is the aft area inside view. Couple years ago, got in there to do some work, cleaned it well, and painted with Rustoleum Zinsser 123 primer. Shows more of the typical construction. Also you can see where I put a shim under the floor wood. When I had planks off I found it needed some work to better fit smoothly to the planking line. That Zinsser paint survives well even under water it stays on. back in 2005, I also had replaced both sides strut and rudder logs (supports strut and rudder) They used a thick bronze plate on top of the log to help hold it together. That fits between the floors. Like a giant washer, better than just having a nut and washer on top of wood.
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  2. fallguy
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    fallguy Senior Member

    I can't sheet how shimming that is right, but alas, I am not a wooden boat builder.

    For me, the shim would get wet, expand, exacerbate the problem.

    I apologize if I sound like an arse, but on repair, I'd not leave that in. Again, not a wood boat guy, so take me with a grain pf salt.

    If the floors separate from the keel; isn't that just a symptom and the shim masking?
     
  3. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    That cant get wet as it is sealed in glue and paint. And there is no standing water say from rain or the sea that can collect there. It could have been the bottom of the floor needed some repair due to some reason, but I did that in 2005, long time ago. I always do what is needed to get it done, but of course dont always write down everything I do. All my planks are edge glued and sealed in various goos. The entire bottom planks are then tight seemed by adhesives, and the boat does not leak. No need to let it soak to swell planks. Makes for a much stronger wall of wood than individually caulked planks only held on by screws. I got rid of all cotton caulking below and above the waterline, the top sides are caulked with DAP Dynaflex 230. What that means is no water can leak between planks. After the Dynaflex is cured fully which can take a month, it forms a dense adhesive rubber and it is waterproof, but not good for underwater seams. All underwater seams I sealed with PL Premium mixed with sawdust, including for the screw holes, they are not bunged. The PL Premium polyurethane adhesive I have found to be waterproof. Even paint can let water in and out. The PL will still let the hull move, and it wont crack. Back then I thought about fiberglass and epoxy, but the reviews from people said that was a bad idea for a conventional wood boat. After I first got the boat and went back in after bottom paint, the boat nearly sank due to the planks having to take up and I decided back then to never let that happen again. Water went over the tops of the batteries and it went way down in the water. And it took several days to fully stop leaking.

    I did things that other people may have never done successfully, and when I talked about it like on the wooden boat forum, was attacked from about every angle you could imagine. But some did finally admit that even though they had never done the things I did, it worked.

    I even hesitated to talk about my recent floor repairs, wondering if it would cause people to say that is so dumb or something,...like you have doomed the boat, etc...

    I can imagine if I posted this same repair on the wooden boat forum, it would be stirring up a lot of people again. But I wonder how many of them are old fuddy duddies, arm chair sitting old guys pontificating from the past. I bet many of them would have told me to not bother repairing the boat but just destroy it. And you know there are not too many left of wood boats from that boat building time still floating.
     
  4. fallguy
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    fallguy Senior Member

    Well, my remarks assumed a wet bilge, but I still see no benefit from the shim. I don't see any purpose in the floors contacting the keel unless mechanically fastened and they are not..
     
  5. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    not normally maybe just sitting in a slip, but the reason floors touch framing is for support, such as in if they are in contact they stiffen the structure. A boat underway in seas and waves is subject to pressure from the waves, stiffening the hull so it wont flex as much puts less stress on the various parts. You dont want the bottom planking flexing up and down with the wave action or when the boat is under power. Repeatedly stressing it will lead to an eventual fatigue failure for the screws, glues planking etc... I boat on the Chesapeake bay, and have been in several hard blows in this boat. One crossing from the eastern shore where are the 'cement ships' from ww2 installed as a breakwater, we had 6 footers and they were close together, we came through ok with an awful lot of heavy pounding.

    It was pretty calm water going there though.
     
    Last edited: Nov 13, 2021
  6. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    Some pics of those cement ships, they are hulk full of nasty splintered iron holes.
    they do form an effective breakwater. I find them on the scary side. Can you imagine being in the water near those things? the water is moving, their is a current through the hulls of these broken ships.
    I think last picture is the inlet formed by 2 lines of ships . On that AM, the wind was blowing and the water inside the line was smooth, but outside were raging tall waves.
    I was shocked at how bad the waves were. I let my daughter's husband bring in the boat, you could not go forward the bow was heaving up and slamming so hard.
    I wanted to wait it out, but he needed to get back, so we went for it. We used the lower helm, cant imagine doing that from upper helm.

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  7. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    Degradation of Wood by Products of Metal Corrosion (fs.fed.us)
    Good read on how metal fasteners decay wood. I have also seen steel nails cause large decay in deck wood.
    Also says this can happen with bronze, and I believe it. I know when I had to reframe, where I did not replace the framing wood in the lower bilge, the bronze screws had turned the area aound the screw to black mush. Being inexperienced at the time, I was drilling 1/2" holes and gluing in home made plugs so the old frames could hold screws again. But that got old real fast, finally ended up cutting out the bad frames and using PT SYP for new framing sections. That has worked out great so far since 2005. Since the frames sit under the floors, I just screwed the remaining oak frame into the floors, and screwed the new frame sections to the floors. And when I replaced the entire transom, frames and all. I did note they had used 2 drifts to align stern post to the keel end. I got rid of those rusty things and used two large bronze bolts as drifts. When I reframed and had the bow apart, there were no steel drifts there, only a series of bronze bolts.

    But I have been thinking it would be better to not use any metal at all as drifts. Use a very strong wood, like IPE, black locust, Iron wood or Cumaru as drifts, and glue them in. Could grind them out somewhat dowel like to fit a drilled hole. Maybe upsized from 1/2" to 5/8" thick. I have worked with Cumaru, used it as my worm shoe, and it is a wonderful wood. Black locust might be cheaper and better, it certainly wont rot. And if I did core drill out the old rusty drifts, the hole made would be 5/8"
     
  8. Rumars
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    Rumars Senior Member

    If you want to use trunnels, please do it right and wedge at both ends, either by boring trough (the easy way) or using a blind wedge (takes some experimenting beforehand). Black locust is a very traditional trunnel wood, but I don't imagine the others you mentioned to be less suitable.
    Making dowels is simple, you need a dowelmaker, wich is nothing but an oversized pencil sharpener and can be shop made.
     
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  9. Rumars
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    Rumars Senior Member

    Using treenails:


     
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  10. DCockey
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    DCockey Senior Member

    Does you boat have a mixture of iron/steel and bronze fasteners, and the boat is used in salt water? Electrolysis?
     
  11. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    The only iron are these drifts through every floor. All other screws and bolts are silicon bronze.
    Yes boat is in salt water, mostly brackish as it is slipped in Chisman Creek in York County VA.
    Of course some electrolysis must occur to damage the wood over these many decades is what I think.

    I have been reading also that submerged soaked wood does not suffer as much as wood that is partially wetted, such as the floor bottoms which wick up bilge water and then it dries. Which is why the keel is ok. The keel there is black in those pics partly due to it soaking wet, a prior owner had an engine oil leak and a lot of wood was stained. And also soaked with iron, the iron has stained the wood. It still holds small screws for bilge pumps and switches. I suppose some oxalic acid would lighten it up. On the last haulout, when I was sanding the skeg, the wood was in very good solid shape. But the surface was of a charred appearance, like if you took a torch and slightly scorched the surface, thought that might be related to electrolysis. But is not rot. Maybe iron also leached to that spot under paint or something over the last 52 years.

    About that oil, when I got boat in 1998, he had a mechanic do a head gasket job on the starboard engine. The dumb mechanic left out a 1/4" oil drain plug in the head. So when engine ran it would slowly drip (no oil pressure) out the plug hole. It would overflow the engine oil pan and leak into the bilge. So it was a bear to clean that up. I used oil bilge socks, pads, pumps, whatever, etc... There was 1/2 inch of oil floating on top of bilge water. You can imagine the mess that caused. Bilge pumps since the hull up forward has a huge deadrise, never pumped out any oil. When I reframed I cleaned up a lot of the wood. I had every bottom plank off the hull up to the water line, reframed the boat in quarters.

    So when I am repairing floors, by screwing on oak planks on each side, I have to make sure as much of that remaining oily grease is out of the wood. My solution was spray the white oak with Oven cleaner, the kind that uses a strong base. That turns oils into soaps. Let it sit overnight. Then spray it down with a hose. Get a scrunge and dish soap and SS steel brush and scraper and scrub the wood hard, spray it off again. Then spray white vinegar to neutralize any of the strong base left, which it never seemed to need. Then do a final spray of hose water. that really worked well on the old white oak surface. The wood only ever tasted slightly vinegary. Wood is also slightly acidic by nature.

    I did some tests with wood and oven cleaner and it caused no problems to the wood surface. Oven cleaner may color the surface of wood, seems to make oak yellower or redder.
    And in a bilge, you dont want to use a flammable hydrocarbon solvent like gasoline for obvious reason.

    After many years of fixing stuff and figuring things out, you do learn to do the things that will work.
     
  12. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    Treenails are really a great idea. In Indonesia wood boat building, they use them to spike the planks edge to edge and for all the interior framing to the planks. The effort is greater than screws, but the payoff is much less cost and much longer life for the boat. Metal fasteners are the quickest way for production builders to just get them sold and out the door. And like Rumars said, they had no intention of their boats to last more than 20 years or so.
     
  13. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    for making dowels, I had been thinking of just running thru a table saw to get a square shape. Then knocking off the corners to get an octagon, and maybe then grinding a little smoother using a grit blade on a table saw or a belt sander. Such a roughed out surface would hold glues well. Another real obvious benefit of wood drifts, they can easily be drilled out, and no corrosion issues. Wedging seems best to me, cut a small slot and a tapered wedge, and hammer it home. And of course glues to seal it.
     
  14. fallguy
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    fallguy Senior Member

    I know black locust and cumaru well.

    Black locust is an allergan to many, so if you work with it; wear gloves and an N95 always to avood developing sensitivity or a reaction.

    Cumaru is very splintery. My deck on the house is cumaru. It'll turn black from metal and water, so wedges may cause trouble. Not sure if the locust does or not.

    If your holes are 5/8"; those are going to be really big to make; you'll need to reduce them down to chuck. I'd just run a belt sander and spin them down. Put the belt sander in a vice or use a bench style sander and let the wood spin itself after you knock off the high spots. I used to have a supply of black locust I had milled with a friend. I gave him half of the stuff for helping me mill it all; then he bartered to get all the locust cuz he liked the color so much, otherwise I'd send you some!
     

  15. sdowney717
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    sdowney717 Senior Member

    I have been wondering where to buy Black Locust. I am not allergic to anything so far as wood or allergies to pollen epoxy etc... I got a bunch of red oak fencing boards from Turman Lumber in southwest VA some time ago for a project, they may have it. But I have no family there anymore. It could be Yukon lumber has it in Norfolk. They seem to have everything woodwise. I bought African Mahogany from them a few years ago. I know they had IPE precut as deck boards. The Cumaru I bought was wonderful not splintery for me. Got it from a lumber place in Portsmouth VA and was sold as a decking board, but I used it as a worm shoe. But I did not use it for decking. Are you saying it splintered in direct sun and heat exposed to the weather? I had been liking its appearance instead of teak for covering boards.

    Turman Lumber - Turman Lumber
     
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