QuietDolphin

The shiny new Dezincification Resistant (DZR) brass thru hulls, ball valves and hose fittings are finally here. Can't wait to fit them.

There are two main methods and both of them are approaching the problem from the outside of the hull. Usually it's impossible to take the seacock assemblies apart from the inside due to the bad access and the huge force and large tools needed for breaking the thread-locks and all the old rusty nuts. From outside what you can do is to separate the thru-hull's flange from the threaded part, then you can just pull the whole thing in. One way is to hammer in a wooden plug, then drill into the hole with a slightly (1-2mm) larger hole-saw than the thru-hull hole (which is the inner part of the thru-hull's threaded pipe). I tried this approach first, but my wooden plug kept rotating and falling out, so I opted for the second approach instead. Take an angle grinder with a metal disk and grind away the flange of the thru-hull. You need to be careful and do it with small motions not to damage the hull, but it's doable. This was the first time for me and I managed to get away

As the weather is getting cold to work with sealants outside, installing the thru-hulls will have to wait until the spring. If we'll have a cold spring, I might make a tarp around the hull to be able to heat it up, but we'll see. Until then the interior can be easily heated and working inside with epoxy is possible, so I'm planning to install backing plates. The hull of the Scanmar 35 seems to be quite thick, I measured it to be 14mm (solid GRP laminate + the gelcoat), but some extra thickness might still be good to help distributing the load. I consider this as a "once in a lifetime" job and since there is time till the spring, I want to do it properly, so hopefully I'll never have to do it again. Some people use plywood for backing plates, but I was concerned that if anything goes wrong and water gets in it will rot. So I followed the advice of this article instead and got some solid G10 GRP sheets in 3mm and 10mm thickness from eBay. The plan was t

Now that the boat is on the hard, the first big project is to replace all the seacocks. Some are still originals (30 years old), others were replaced some time ago with brass and are in a bad shape. There are basically three materials that are considered appropriate for use as seacocks: Bronze DZR/CR brass Composite plastic After some research we came to the conclusion to use DZR (Dezincification Resistant) brass for the new seacocks. In some places it's also called CR (Corrosion Resistant) brass or labeled as CW602N. Sadly the Swedish chandleries don't sell those. We could only find CW617N, which has regular zinc content and is not corrosion resistant. It's suitable for freshwater systems only and in a salted environment will last only a few years before it becomes brittle and can break, so it's not an option for a bluewater boat. Some shops have bronze and composite plastic (from Tru-Design), but they are much more expensive than DZR brass and some of the fitti

We managed to sell our previous boat (a Maxi 87) and went on hunting for a new one. I was browsing the ads almost every day even before that, just to get familiar with the market. The Maxi was our first boat and the only thing we focused on when buying her was the layout with a dinette and two separate aft bunks for the kids. Which was a good start. But as it's usually the case we learned about all the other important things in a boat on the go and started to understand our own needs. So for the next boat a list of requirements were made. The most important things were: not larger than 35 feet as we want a boat that we can manage and maintain even shorthanded no deep draft ( <1.8m) so we can reach the shallower anchorages quality solid GRP laminate hull, no blisters partial rig that's easy to handle: roller furling, lazy jacks, all lines to the cockpit wheel steering no teak deck, less maintenance and less leaks to worry about wider space on deck for moving safely (