After a morning at Charleston Executive Airport talking with a flight instructor about what it takes to get a private pilots license, I got a tour of the Cessna 150 and the Piper used for instruction. After spending countless hours flying that same Cessna in FSX, it was cool to sit in the cockpit and understand (for the most part) what all those knobs and dials do. Heading back to reality, I decided to spend the afternoon removing the tiller mount on the boat.
It was only after I unpinned the tiller that I got a good look at what thirty five years of friction can do to metal.
This was going to take a little more work than I thought. It was nice to find that I wasn't going to have to deal with fiberglass. I was however going to have to drill out the rivets and remove the metal banding to get a good look at things and that meant I would have to get a rivet tool. Thank goodness for Harbor Freight. What costs fifty five dollars at Lowe's cost me fifteen dollars at HF. Nice.
The next step was to remove the tiller mount. Holy corrosion batman. It took almost an hour to remove the six bolts.
There was no way that last one was going to budge so I decided to cut my losses and move on.
Cleaning up the goo.
Poor gal.
Time to clean up and enjoy the evening.
Is that marine tex or caulking that you are scraping off? And don't 6 big bolts seem like overkill? It's not exactly a Whitbread boat.
ReplyDeleteDear John,
ReplyDeleteIt seemed to be a combination of both. There was some dry rot caulk on top that scraped off, but I had to put some 150 to work on the marine-tex underneath it. And yeah I am pretty sure that tiller was an early replacement that was over-sized. At a glance, it looks proportional to the boat, but the parts themselves are huge up close. After removing the tiller mount, I could see the original three holes aligned in the center which had been filled and 'tex'ed over before the replacement mount was just bolted in over it and caulked half-assed. They had ripped out all the foam block along the transom which I am sure contributed to its weakened state. What a tard. You don't put an addition on a house and then pull out the foundation from under it. I think the over-sized tiller(post?)is what rubbed a hole in the aluminum gunwale. For the next step, we are going to remove the aluminum gunwale and marine-tex the deck to the transom and then sand it all flush. Hopefully that will work. We can't afford a new tiller system right now so I have to figure out how to remount this one without allowing the tiller post to rub the transom. Maybe this is an opportunity to find some teak and shape one custom. Stay tuned.