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Monday, April 8, 2013

Installing toe rails - the year long saga.

9 comments:

Wow great job guys!! Looks fantastic :)

Really nice job, guys> you guys are almost there! and we're all rootin" for you> DB in Frankfurt//

Very nice addition! Good job. Rik

Rik, I saw that you are building a Welsford Pathfinder! I love Welsford's designs. I have plans for Rogue and Penguin in my collection, and I dream of building a pathfinder one day. Looks amazing!

That's mighty impressive, guys. Still loving the blog.

I'm undertaking the same project (ugh!). I've been looking carefully at your pictures, and am I incorrect in believing that your hull-deck joint is glassed-over? If so, did you guys do that, or was it done previously? Rob

The hull to deck joint is not glassed over. On the inside there is a layer of glass tape on the joint from the factory, but it is not structural, it is just to prevent water intrusion. When we removed the toerails, we epoxied all of the old holes shut so we could drill a new series of holes, but there is no glass over the external joint, mainly because through bolting is a structural necessity. If you want to strictly have a glassed hull to deck joint, then a LOT of work must go into it to make it structural such as feathering the new glass work a good foot and a half or more down the side of the hull. Our bolt size and spacing measurements were taken from Lloyds of London scantlings requirements for a boat our size/displacement and shape.

Look great and very beautiful, but you still have lots of holes that are a potential leak. ... or, you could read Hal Roth's book "After 50,000 Miles" and do away with the deck attached toe rail. I followed his suggestion and did it to my boat. Here is a link to my blog of my project. http://svchasingsummer.blogspot.com/2013_04_01_archive.html

Looks great! Are you still happy with the 4000UV? About to embark on this project as well. Thanks for any advice you have!

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Toe Rail Replacement: Teak or Mahogany

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My toe rails were rebuilt with solid glass. You can get as smooth a finish as needed, just needs painting and doesnt look like wood, but it can not rot! You look like you are after a rubbing strip as well. If so I would look at the first one as it is easier to built and repair as need be. regards DC  

Bedding the inside edge of your one piece concept against a deck that seems like it will hold water against the seam, or underneath it, looks like a potential problem to me. Particularly, if you intend to varnish.  

I agree with the glass suggestion...true teak or true mahogany , if you can get them, are out of this world in price...while fake teak may look nice, it isn't as tight grained and does not have the natural oils to preserve itself...faux mahog is the same, looser grain and very prone to holding moisture...if you are insistent on the wood toe rail, you might want to laminate the pieces so they have a rabbit that will fit over the top and laminate them at the top glue joint. To handle the curve, you can't go more than about a half an inch thickness or you will spend your fortune on clamps to hold the darned things together while they dry. (speaking from experience here) If you want another idea, look at clear cedar...it has a nice patina when finished with several coats of poly, won't rot easily, and, though softer, holds up well if you don't beat it too much. You can also screw a piece of matching cedar to the outside and create a rub rail to protect the toe rail when docking or in a slip. Ed Simpson Skipper (when my wife lets me) S/V Das Dawg Haus  

Spar varnish, methinks, not polyurethane.  

I have a Tartan 27 from 1967 that also has a teak toe (and rub) rail (different hull/deck joint though). While it looks nice once finished I believe that using wood, especially expensive wood like teak for your rub rail is a poor choice and use of materials. It cracks easily enough if/when it hits a solid object. Ask me how I know this; which is the reason I've had to replace several sections. For the rub rail portion (outboard) I'd recommend anything but expensive wood like teak or mahogany. In fact some kind of rubberized rub rail would be a more practical solution, IMHO. For the cap rail portion (top side and inboard) you could use a nice wood as this is more visible. It is also not as functional as some of the perforated aluminum cap rails that I have seen on other boats that require little or no maintenance. If you are going to go with wood (of some kind) your idea of fabricating a 1 piece molding in the shape to accommodate the hull deck joint is a non-starter (again my humble opinion). As the wood needs to be bent along the shape of the boat your molding will distort and deform. You would be better off going with 2 or even 3 rectangular shaped pieces to make up your desired shape. That is still going to require a lot of screws, bungs and delicate bending to get it to conform to the shape you want. As mentioned: wood stock of < 1/2" is much easier to bend then thicker stuff unless you want to use a steam box and jig to pre-shape your pieces. I have kept the teak toe/cap rail on our boat as it was originally and it is pretty once attached and finished but you would be surprised at how easily teak can split along the grain. Teak weathers the elements quite well but it is not really suited for this application. Not as good looking but waaay more practical for this application is stuff like this: Crest Aluminum Marine Toerail  

white oak, pretty common, not expensive will turn silver like teak or mahogany, bends well, and can be obtained at sawmills in long lengths. Heavy, but then teak is to.  

There are many woods called mahogany but what is "fake teak"? I wouldn't use cedar as it is really too soft. Iroko would be a good choice if it is available in your area. I would not want wood in that location though as it is hard to keep up and a source of leaks. Fiberglassing it over would eliminate future leaks and require no maintenance.  

Caleb The aluminum toerail you linked to is a good idea but I don't know if one is available that would work with that kind of hull/deck join. I have one but the deck sits on an inward flange of the hull, as all I have seen are designed for. Maybe there is an extrusion available that will work. It would be expensive but a wood toerail will be expensive as well as the labor involved. Denise - white oak only has one problem - if it gets wet it turns black.  

mitiempo said: Caleb The aluminum toerail you linked to is a good idea but I don't know if one is available that would work with that kind of hull/deck join. I have one but the deck sits on an inward flange of the hull, as all I have seen are designed for. Maybe there is an extrusion available that will work. It would be expensive but a wood toerail will be expensive as well as the labor involved. Click to expand...

Look for a sheet metal fab shop in your area. They might be able to make something out of either aluminum or stainless. If done from a sheet and they have a break press long enough you can get 12 foot sections made.  

After due market research in the South Florida region, I'm leaning heavily on Jatoba. It looks like teak (tight grained, absolutely gorgeous), is cheap and locally available (Shell Lumber, Miami is excellent), and most importantly it is highly rot resistant and strong as hell. My only concern is that it will be difficult to bend into shape without cracking given its great density. Anybody have any experience with this wood?  

I've seen boats that replaced rotten teak toerails with recycled material that has the same look as wood but with no maintnance, it bends and hold curves easily. There is a company by me and they sell outdoor furniture made of this material in many different colours from pind to black, could this be and option?  

Aesthetically, my boat needs help where it can get it, also I can't install an aluminum rail as functional as that would be, so I'm planning on wooden toerails.  

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Life is too short to say later. And winters suck.

Boat Project: Removing, re-bedding and resealing the toerail and hull-deck joint (in Portland, Maine)

It’s been a while since we’ve done a big boat project… so this one definitely deserves a little write-up! Non-boaters, or boaters with boats that don’t leak ( liars !), feel free to skip this one 😉

What’s the big deal?

Okay, so a short back-story… we bought Brio in the middle of the desert. It really doesn’t rain much there, so leaks were not a concern of ours for the first ~2 years of boat ownership.

But as we journeyed into the tropics (aka: the rainforest!) and experienced our first real offshore weather (aka: waves pounding on the deck, forcing seawater into every crevice, nook and cranny on the boat), we discovered *SURPRISE* that we had a few leaks.

Well, actually, each side of the toerail has 60 bolts (with 60 corresponding holes), so “a few leaks” might be a little kind. In the wrong conditions, she leaked real good.

I have to say that watching disgusting salt water pour down the walls and into our clothes cupboard / electrical panel / bookshelf / floor MIGHT just be the most disheartening boat-related activity I’ve ever experienced.

By the time we reached Panama we were desperate for a solution. Using what we had at hand, Jon smeared every bolt head and the edge of the toerail with some 5200, and this helped us make it to Maine with (fewer) leaks.

Anyways, all this to say that this is a job we’ve been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to having done for a LONG time.

Finally Time

One of the best articles that we found on re-bedding a sailboat toerail says that it’s not “hard”, it’s just labour-intensive. This is probably the truest statement I can think of. It’s not necessarily hard to undo nuts and pull out bolts, it’s just time-consuming and labour-intensive to take the whole interior of the boat apart, contort your body into weird acrobatic shapes to reach the extra-special nuts, lose your fingerprints as you clean and acid-etch the ancient aluminum toerail, and bake in the beating sun while praying it doesn’t rain 🙂

It does mean that you might find yourself awake at 5am on a Sunday because you are DETERMINED to get this job done before the weekend is over, allowing some spectacular sunrise photos to take place that might not have otherwise.

I should now confess that we actually did the first side a month ago. We spent the 4th of July watching fireworks while wearing headlamps and re-installing the very last few new bolts and nuts. It then took another month for us to feel ready to tackle the other side (including needing a non-rainy weekend to do the job!).

 Our Hull-Deck Joint

Now, on our boat the toerail bolts are also what hold the deck to the hull. A rather important job. We had a hunch that our leaks might actually be coming from the hull-deck joint, so we made the executive decision to “pop” the hull-deck joint as we went, enabling us to clean out all the old / non-existent sealant and re-bed the joint with 5200.

In case you’re wondering, popping the deck off your sailboat’s hull is FREAKING SCARY. As sunlight filtered in the now-open-gap, I definitely crossed a few fingers and said a few prayers that this wouldn’t be forever remembered as “ the day we broke the boat “.

Thankfully we didn’t break the boat, and by opening up the hull-deck joint we were able to get a satisfying amount of 5200 all along the length of the boat’s joint, as well as between the toerail and the deck.

*How much 5200 was a question that we were very curious to discover; the article we were using as a reference noted that he used FOURTEEN tubes of 5200 (which, if you’re wondering, is also about $280 worth of sealant!!). This seemed like a crazy number to me, but in the end we did use 11 tubes . Quite a lot more than I would have ever guessed!! Oh and black 5200 retails for about double the price of white 5200, so that’s where my $$ numbers are coming from.

So here, in short, are the steps we took to re-bed our toerail and reseal the hull-deck joint:

• Loosen all the rigging. We read this was important to ensure the deck stays lined up with the hull, and we found that it was actually *super* important to be able to get the hull and deck joined up again too. Loosen those shrouds!

• Get back to work. Clean and wipe down all surfaces. Acetone is your friend.
• Tape newspaper inside every cupboard. 5200 on a warm day is goopy stuff, and it definitely ran through the hull deck joint in MANY places.
• Tape the deck and hull. The goal is to get a nice clean line, not 5200 everywhere. Good luck 😉
• Have a giant glass of water and a pee and a snack. You really can’t stop once you start the next step.
• String up the toerail at deck level. Two halyards did this job well.

• Get the first bolt in. In our case, the first five “bolts” are actually screws that go into a tapped aluminum plate, so that made the first section of toerail relatively easy to get realigned.
• More goop, bolts, washers, nuts, struggling. Tighten loosely (aside: is “tighten loosely” an oxymoron?? or just a weird thing to say…). We’d continue with another 5 feet of bolts, then go back and tighten down the first 5′ section… trying to get the 5200 to seep through the hull deck joint nicely (which it did).

• Remove the tape. Don’t leave it overnight. It might SAY that it won’t be tack-free for at least 24 hours, but it’s lying. We left the first side’s tape on for… too long… and ended up having to slice a clean line with a razor to get the tape to peel nicely #boatlessons.

• Continue discussion with multiple iterations of ‘do you think it will still leak?!?’ . This does not get old.

• Put the darn boat back together. This is the “forgotten” step that is happily waiting for you just when you’re ready to shower and celebrate a job well done and sleep… and then you realize your bed is covered in teak boards and you haven’t seen the settees in at least 48 hours. Why is it that re-assembly is so much less satisfying than disassembly??

August update: Happy to report we have finished both sides & put the boat back together, so we can finally GO SAILING! Woohooooo 😀

– LMK

Boat Project: Removing, re-bedding and resealing the toerail and hull-deck joint (in Portland, Maine) — 11 Comments

Well written and easily understood – on all fronts 🙂

We rebed Tao’s toe rail too- though we didn’t do the whole project like you. Got some cool tools for pulling all the old caulking out as well, left the bolts in and re-caulked both outside edges. It worked amazingly well for not having been the whole job that you did! NICE WORK and wonderful write up.

Great guide for the less handy types like myself. Thanks for taking the time to put it together!

Well…..does it still leak????? Don’t leave us hanging.

Haha it was a SUCCESS! No more leaks! Still stands as one of the most annoying but ultimately rewarding projects we’ve done on the boat 🙂

Hey thanks for posting. I am doing the same job now, but I will be using 4200 or 4000. 5200 you should put on something that will never need to come off. Toe rail, may indeed need to come off again.

Good luck with your project! We will definitely sell the boat before we have to do this job again 😉

Hi did you put anything IN the bolt holes when you put the toe rail back? Or just loads of 5200? Thanks Ed.

Hi Edward! We replaced all of the bolts with new stainless bolts, washers and nuts. The existing holes were very tight, so we bed everything in 5200 and haven’t had an issue since! (Knock On Wood)

On a 1966 Ericson 35 we replaced about four feet of mahogany 3/4 thick by 2 in deep sections by the aft cockpit, that sit between the hull and the deck. Stainless screws go into these (about 2 1/2 in screws, threw the steel rail), alternating with 4 1/4” bolts with nuts on the bottom. These were held with a needle nose length set of vice grips from below, and using an impact tool size flat tip above the deck to unscrew them. DID not use 5200, agree with above section that cap rails may have to come up later for maintenance, hard landings, etc. 4000 or 4200 seals just as well.

But the main reason for adding to above – is where you pushed a screw driver in I used a 1/4 in or 5/16 drill bit (12 in length), to manually check for wood strength, especially for the screws. If I could scrape out all the soft wood, I then used Titebond III waterproof glue to insert wood plugs or dowels in the old hole, then drilled them out with an 1/8 in drill just an inch deep or so, and the reseated the 2 1/2 screws with 4200 on the upper 1/2 of the shaft that goes through the toe rail.

Where I found the damage was more than these ‘plug and seal’ fixes, I did have to lift up the cap rail sections. Fortunately that was only one section below the steel rail.

A friend cautioned some folks scuttle their boat to avoid this! I laughed, until he said it takes 45 min a hole. There were 175 bolts and screws around my cap rail. And just as many 2 hour ‘gotchas’ as he described above. I repaired each sectiin as it leaked, and had to tent over one new area over a winter. But over several sailing seasons (5?!) finished each area in forty hour shifts. The butyl chalking tape available in 3/4 or 1 in width that sits between the wooden cap rail and the deck costs a fortune, is really sticky to work with – try a twelve inch section until you get used to it. And really clean the two surfaces, even use chalking primer to prep it. That stuff is like $35 a roll for twelve or fifteen feet – but worth every penny.

Scuttling a boat is a lot easier in retrospect – but you miss out on the fun part of ‘messing’ about in boats… :). Good luck everyone. After all this you learn to really look at your hull/deck joint before you buy a boat…

Like it! I seem to have a few leaks coming in on bolts in one spot.

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A New Toe Rail For an Old Warhorse

Posted by Hugh Owens | Hull & Structure , Projects

Beefing up a retired racer with aluminum

My mate, Karlene, and I looked long and hard for a sailboat suitable for world cruising that we could afford. I’ve become convinced that boat speed is an important component of voyaging safety, so a major goal in our search was to find a good old fast boat! In Tampa, Fla., we found a neglected Cal 48 yawl.

This boat had been raced hard and put away wet for too many years, and Karlene and I had our doubts as we motored out into Tampa Bay for our sea trials. We hoisted the baggy, tattered, but fully battened, main in a warm, 13-knot breeze, and off she skipped at 7 knots. We unfurled the jib and were stunned as she heeled gently and roared off at more than 9 knots. What fun! Concealing our excitement, we made an appropriate offer that eventually was accepted. In time, our Cal 48, renamed Koho, landed in Pocatello, Idaho, where we started the refit.

If you examine enough old classic plastic, you will find recurrent flaws and problems that span a range of manufacturers. Our Cal 48 was no different. She was plagued with stanchion and hull-to-deck leaks, as well as untabbed and broken bulkheads, which are especially prevalent in older racers like Koho. Nevertheless, we felt that our time and money would be better spent restoring a swift, old, racing sailboat than a slower, more traditional, cruiser. We hoped the payoff would be in sparkling noon-to-noon runs. The refit of Koho has been total, but I’d like to focus on the structural solutions changes that we made to the toerail and hull-to-deck joint.

Sealed holes

We stripped every piece of hardware off the hull and deck and sealed all the holes with epoxy. Nevertheless, steady rains revealed persistent leaks from one end of the boat to the other that were coming from the toerail. Our toerail was an attractive piece of teak, 1 1/4 inches by 2 1/2 inches, laid on edge and secured every 4 to 6 inches with 5/16-inch stainless steel machine screws covered with teak bungs. The teak toerail also covered the hull-to-deck lap joint. A first-generation mystery sealant bedded the joint.

Near the cockpit, a genoa track was bolted to the top of the toerail and secured by nuts and washers below deck. Under the genoa track, virtually every bolt leaked because of the substantial loads on the track from the huge sail. Reluctantly we took the Sawzall to our beautiful toerail. We made attempts to save the 4-inch stainless steel bolts, but most of them were severely corroded in the anoxic environment of the leaky toerail. We then lifted the deck off the hull, using dozens of wedges. Most of the bulkheads released the deck with minimal fuss.

Once the joint was free and the deck was lifted up a few inches, we could clean and blow out the gap and apply 3M 5200 marine adhesive sealant, rebolt the hull to the deck, and reattach the bulkheads with multiple layers of biaxial cloth and epoxy resin on both sides of the bulkhead. Critical, highly stressed bulkheads – such as the main bulkhead near the cap shrouds and the ones under the lowers – were given additional layers of fiberglass and epoxy.

Some of the brackets used

Overkill, perhaps

On the main bulkhead, a laminated deckbeam was epoxied and bolted to the upper face of the bulkhead and epoxied to the underside of the deck. Stainless steel carriage bolts from the top of the deck were then fastened through this laminated beam. Strong? You betcha! Overkill? Perhaps, but I used this technique on a 39-foot boat I built some years ago. During a bad blow that boat was thrown sideways off a large wave and landed with a shattering crash on her port side and sustained no structural damage. The only downside to this technique is the time it takes.

Clamping up prior to final mounting

The critical bulkheads also received additional aluminum angle reinforcement where they contacted the hull/deck joint, and bolts with backing plates and/or washers were placed around the perimeter of the bulkhead to mechanically reinforce the joint.

We next turned our attention to strengthening and sealing the hull-to-deck joint. The upper hull and decks on these Cals are thinly constructed, in keeping with their racing heritage. We concluded that the only feasible fix was to fiberglass the joint from the outside. To do this, the watertight but rough-appearing hull/deck joint was faired with filled epoxy and sanded, then multiple overlapping layers of biaxial cloth and mat were laid over the hull and deck joint to a thickness of nearly a quarter-inch. More fairing, compounding, and sanding was done to ease the transition between old and new glass.

Prohibitive cost

The next task was to design and build a new toerail. We looked at many options. Commercial aluminum toerail was feasible but the cost was prohibitive and what about all those holes every few inches in our now watertight deck? Hal and Margaret Roth, on Whisper, used a clever method detailed in their book After 50,000 Miles. They brazed Everdur (silicon bronze) plates to the outside of the stanchion bases and then attached a 1-inch by 4-inch teak toerail outside the stanchions to the Everdur plates. They raised the teak 3/4 inch off the deck for water drainage. This seemed like a good idea. Reapplying a wood toerail or bulwark remained an option, but I wanted to avoid the leaks and maintenance associated with wood.

Years ago I worked on commercial salmon boats in Alaska. I remembered how the aluminum gillnetters used 1/2-inch by 2-inch flat bar stock as a toerail. It was welded edge-up to an angle extrusion at the deck edge to stiffen that vulnerable area from impacts with tenders and rough docks. I have long believed that aluminum is the best material for cruising boats, but we were unable to find a suitable aluminum boat that we could afford, and I began to wonder if aluminum and fiberglass could be married during Koho’s refit, thereby gaining the advantages of both materials.

We considered having aluminum angle bent to match the outside curve of our hull and deck. We had different angle extrusions bent at a local fabrication shop, but the differing and constantly changing angles of the hull and deck made this idea unworkable. We rejected welding as well.

Screwed and bolted

Eventually we settled on overlapping flat bar stock screwed and bolted together. In some areas, the aluminum was prepped and epoxied together, but the bulk of the construction used 3M 5200, 1/4-inch screws, and stainless steel bolts attaching the plates to each other and to the hull. The most useful and crucial part of the design is the 1/2-inch by 2-inch flat bar stock that becomes the toerail. The sections are 12 feet long with 1/8-inch gaps on the ends for expansion in the severe climatic changes we experience in the Rockies. The toerail is stiffened at the joints where these flat bar sections meet with brackets made from 1/4-inch aluminum angle, bandsawed and sanded to a pleasing shape, and bolted to the toerail and deck using oversized holes.

Holes are drilled in this flatbar in key areas in a manner similar to the commercially available perforated aluminum toerail. The toerail is supported at about 3-foot intervals by the support brackets. Every other support bracket has a stanchion base. Bolts fasten through the stanchion base, toerail bracket, and the deck to aluminum backing plates beneath. Once bolted or tapped and fastened together with machine screws and 5200, the whole assembly is astonishingly stiff and robust.

After installing the toerail, we attached a 1/4-inch by 4-inch aluminum plate to the hull so that it fit directly under the toerail and in contact with it. This served to cover the fiberglass overlap and strengthen the joint. We called this piece the “hull plate.”

Rigid structure

A final 1/4-inch by 2-inch flat plate was tapped and screwed to the toerail above and the 1/4-inch by 4-inch hull plate below. This effectively joined the toerail to the hull plate, making a very rigid structure that could not have been cold formed in place if it had been a single piece.

A 3/4-inch by 2-inch section of white UHMW (ultra-high molecular weight) polyethylene was fastened with flat-head machine screws into tapped holes in this bar to form a rubbing strake.

Tapping the aluminum allows replacement or repair of the UHMW in the future. I considered wood, aluminum, and PVC. We felt that UHMW offered a durable material that was a more friendly surface against the tender topsides of fellow yachties. I have high regard for UHMW. I’ve used it wherever friction needs to be reduced. For example, I lined a chute with UHMW to feed our anchor chain into the chain locker. The anchor chain glides into the locker as if sliding on Teflon. We also used it in front of our deck cleats in lieu of deck chocks to reduce chafe on the lines.

The aluminum bar stock and extruded angles that I used were alloy 6061, which is the normally available alloy for extrusions. This 6061 is commonly used in aluminum yacht and workboat construction, but it is best used in above-water applications. It has less corrosion resistance than the true saltwater alloys such as the 5000 series. We plan to paint the aluminum for the sake of an improved appearance.

Plastic spacers

We took great care to make sure no copper containing alloys came in contact with the aluminum. Our stanchion bases are made of either bronze or 316 stainless steel. They were made locally and they have a thin plastic (UHMW) spacer isolating the stanchion bases from the aluminum bracket beneath. The aluminum was painted with epoxy and linear polyurethane paint, and while that is probably sufficient isolation from stainless, it’s not that much more work to put in a little polyethylene spacer. We attached the genoa track to a 2-inch by 2-inch by 1/4-inch length of aluminum angle bolted to the inside of our aluminum toerail. This tactic alone saved almost 100 holes through the deck. The aluminum angle was bent using a plywood template by a local steel shop to conform exactly to the curvature of the deck. The track angle is braced additionally every 4 feet with aluminum angle bolted to the deck and glued with 5200. The finished track seems sturdy and superior to what it replaced.

In our most heavily loaded bulkheads I placed the toerail aluminum angle brackets over the interior structural bulkheads. Additional aluminum angle pieces were bolted to the bulkheads and fastened to the angle toerail brackets above to tie all these components together. The oversized deck cleats were bolted over the bulkheads to the aluminum angles below. This is considerably stronger than just using conventional backing plates.

The majority of vessels I’d examined weren’t husky enough to cope with the boisterous high-latitude offshore sailing conditions we expect Koho to encounter. I think that aluminum construction is superior to all other boatbuilding methods if you want to wed lightness and strength. My concept during this refit was to use this superb material to strengthen and stiffen an older fiberglass sailboat, utilizing one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust.

Article from Good Old Boat magazine, May/June 2001.

About The Author

Hugh, an anesthesiologist in Idaho, is completing a total refit of Koho, a 1966 Cal 48. He and his wife, Karlene, formerly lived and sailed in Alaska on their 40-foot home-built sailboat, Endurance. They are preparing Koho for a voyage to Antarctica and New Zealand.

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Taco Rub Rail

Made from premium aluminum alloys and a clear satin anodized finish, our TACO Marine Sailboat Toe Rail mounts along the edge of the deck and is designed to attach lines and hardware.

Features and Benefits

• 1-1/4- x 5/8-inch slots for attachments
• Slot spacing on 10-inch centers
• Drilled and countersunk for #8 screws on 4-inch centers
• 20 feet, 10-3/4 inches (250.75 inches) long
• Polished, Clear Anodized finish
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Custom Teak Boat Toe Rail Replacements

SYNTHETIC TEAK BOAT TOE RAILS

Weight: Varies Part #: M-TRTOERL

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Product Information

Take off that old rotten teak!

Many boats have toe rails that are special in one way or another and we can match your exact specs. If you don’t have existing toe rails, we can start from scratch.

The warm look of teak adds charm and a classic look to any boat. Yours can be beautiful ALL of the time without the work. The next time you have them off, send them in for duplication and be done with maintaining them.

Custom PlasTEAK Installation Guide

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This item is only available by contacting PlasDECK. Call us at 330-668-2587 or email us .

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Toe rails and spray rails.

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• Ask An Oday Owner

Greetings I have a ODay 302 and discovered the wood backing for the toe board is rotted out. Most of the port side and part of the starboard. The bolts that hold the toe board come through the hull and have a 1/2” wood backing. The wood backing is tabbed over with glass and is holding the water in from any leaking bolts and being absorbed by the wood. Is this common for Oday 302? Anyone done this repair? Looking for options on best way. Boat is on the Great Lakes and spend majority of the time in the yard. Thanks  

Will Gilmore

Do you have a picture or two to show the type of damage you're describing? I'm inclined to suggest a good bleaching to kill any and all rot fungus then rebuild with glass and epoxy, but replacing the wood might be the better option, I don't know. -Will (Dragonfly)  

Will Photo of damage, water gets trapped behind tab  

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I'd look for an experienced structural composite person to get advice. It may cost a bit for the advice but probably save time and money. Having said that, what about removing the bolts, replacing the wood with vinylester or epoxy mix and re-drilling/re-bolting?  

Thanks for responding nramsey. That is my intent at this time. Just seeing if anyone has insight if that will work or if I will need to remove the toe rail. I often start a project only to find out I needed to do something else.  

Thanks Brian for the response. I figured as much. Not too concerned with removing the old wood and glass. Rebedding the bolds should not be too hard. Not sure if the toe rail needs to be pulled and resealed. I would assume the toe rail is glued down. Pulling it up might damage the deck. Seem like the water is coming from the bolts.  

Voyager1 said: Not sure if the toe rail needs to be pulled and resealed. I would assume the toe rail is glued down. Pulling it up might damage the deck. Seem like the water is coming from the bolts. Click to expand

Hi Voyager1 - An older post but I was wondering what you ended up doing. My understanding of what O’Day did here was to bolt through the deck overhang and then hull to make the hull joint. The aluminum toe rail was then screwed on through the hull over or on top of the hull/deck joint and covering the hull/deck bolts. As a backing for the bolts and maybe to have something more for the screws to bite or bed into, O’Day glassed in a ribbon of plywood bow to stern at the hull/deck joint. In my case, it looks as though water has followed the screws to the plywood and caused it to rot out. Now I’m wondering how to rebuild these areas. I don’t think I’m going to put wood back or re-glass. Just new backing for the bolts and screws. Thinking 1/8 or 1/4 inch aluminum strip or a plastic of some kind.  

I used an oscillating Tool to cut the tabbing out an rotted wood. I did use 1/4” wood as a backing, would go 1/2” if doing it again. I epoxied the wood prior to installing. I wasn’t going to use wood but I needed something to screw the interior wood trim too. Did not replace the tabbing. Took a day two people one side. I wish I would of also cleaned the old sealant and reapplied. Had plenty of extra bolts and nuts, found several with the nuts snapped off. Good luck, let me know how it goes.  

Thanks for your reply and your solution. I forgot about the interior trim so, yeah, I will need something that will take a screw. After so many years, the fasteners and joint have loosened up. Going half inch wood would probably need longer bolts but I’ll size that up. If some of your bolts were snapped, a larger bolt might be in order as well. And new sealant all around. Will solve a lot annoying little leaks. Thanks again. I’ll let you know how it goes. Cheers,  

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