Chainplate Knee Replacement and Material

More photos of the project, showing the upper and lower aft chainplate knees adjacent to the starboard pilot berth.

 

Your new knees and chainplates do look very impressive indeed, with excellent workmanship.

I know this is thread drift, but I am sure that we would all like to see some photos of the rest of the boat as well.
What other areas did you cover in your refit in addition to the chainplates?

 

I agree with bajansailor that the work looks very good.I'd go further and say that the original design and build processes were also good as their long life testifies.I hope reading this will encourage more people to understand that you don't have to use exotic or expensive materials to do a good and durable job,thorough design and conscientious work are the key and here we see them on display.

 

Bajansailor & Wetfeet - Thank you for your comments. The refit has covered a bit of nearly everything, really too much to cover fully here, though I could start a new thread entirely on the complete restoration. For a picture record, I have an instagram that shows the whole refit: https://www.instagram.com/sv_questofpaget/. The biggest issue was a rotten deck - The hull is Airex cored fiberglass (which had extensive work done to it in a 1980s refit prior to my ownership), but the deck and cabin structure was built of mahogany plywood with a single 6 or 8oz fiberglass layer over in order to meet the deadline to make the Admirals Cup regatta for that season. Back in the 90s, the previous owner installed a teak deck over that plywood to "fix" some soft parts of the deck, and as that aged and leaked, the plywood beneath turned into potting soil - it should have been a red flag when the subdeck leaked on sunny days! My dad, brother, and I tore everything off to the mahogany deck frames, leaving the cabin in place. I replaced the deck with two layers of 3/8" okoume marine plywood set into thickened epoxy, and 1 to 2 layers (depending on the area) of 1708 glass over everything, plus filler and fairing.

I patched the cabin from below and above, scarfing in new laminations of thin plywood to match the existing radius. Much of the cockpit was also replaced and glassed over, followed by new alexseal paint throughout the whole deck and cabin. Unlike when they built the boat, I epoxy sealed every section of end grain plywood, and every deck and cabin penetration has an epoxy anulus to mitigate water intrusion into the wood. On deck, I made new wood hardware, teak handrails, sliding hatches, and dorade boxes. The skeg-hung rudder originally swept the underside of the transom, but a tapered hull section was designed by S&S and installed in the 70s to lower the top edge of the rudder and (my guess) reduce rudder ventilation when healed over. This had also taken on water at some point and had to be fully rebuilt. I faired and painted the hull with alexseal topcoat earlier this year, rolled on. The interior is slowly coming back together, with updates to systems and a new v berth, and the plan is to launch this coming May.