In the fall of 2002 I began work on restoring the wood on board. I started by cleaning up the toerail, which was in terrible condition. As that project began to come together, I decided to pull off the old coamings, so that I could refinish them indoors over the winter. However, when I got the old coamings off and really began to investigate, it became clear that they were in need of a huge amount of work. The whole forward section appeared to be riddled with dry rot, and it looked like I would have to scarf in some new teak to effect a good repair.

The overall condition of the old coamings didn't warrent such an in-depth repair: they were scarred from years of neglect and abuse, and even after hours of elbow grease, I feared they would still be sub-par. At the urging of Heather and Tim Lackey, I decided to replace the old coamings with new mahogany ones.

A Return to Don's Shop

I didn't want to glue up multiple boards for the coamings, so I knew I was going to need access to a thickness planer capable of handling 14 inch wide boards. Fortunately, I am lucky to have a couple of friends with commercial cabinetmaking shops, so I knew this wouldn't be a big obstacle. In fact, I had solicited Don's help in 2002 when I built my new mast beam. I arranged with Don to meet him at his shop on a convenient Saturday afternoon. I spent the morning at Maine Coast Lumber pawing through the bins looking for appropriate boards. I ended up buying a bit more wood than I needed, since the best looking boards that were wide enough were also a bit long. I ended up with a 9 foot and an 11 foot board, both 14 inches wide.

When I got to the shop, the first thing to do was plane the boards to thickness. While simple, working such large boards actually required both of us to handle. After several passes on both sides, we had two smooth, flat boards of identical thickness. We were able to keep the boards to a bit more than 3/4 inch finished thickness, which was nice.

Templates and routers, pencils and planes

I had the old coamings with me, which we used as templates to lay out the new coamings on the boards. We did our best to choose the sections of the boartds that exhibited the nicest grain pattern. When we ran the boards through the planer, I was pleased to find an attractive, swirly grain pattern on both boards.

We cut the sheer on the upper edge of the coamings with a jigsaw. I then spent some time with a low-angle block plane fairing out the sheer. While I worked the sheer on the second comaing, Don cut the notch and ornamental swoop at the after end of the first coaming, then rouned over the upper and lower edges with a 3/8 inch roundover bit in his router. We repeated this with the second coaming. We left the forward end blank and longer than necessary, so that I could cut the forward end to fit "on location" back at the boat.

Troubles brewing

The next day I pulled the boat cover back and went to work fitting the new coamings to the boat. I decided to go ahead and use the old coamings as a rough template for the notch at the forward end of the comaings, but I cut the notch a little shallow, as I figured it would be better to have to remove a bit of extra material, rather than have the fit too loose to begin with.

I took the coamings up onto the boatand spent a couple of hours test fitting the coamings, removing material slowly with a block plane, and then 40 grit sandpaper and a sanding block. Eventually I got both coamings fit, and I sat back to rest for a few moments. As I was sitting there, it slowly began to dawn on me that something didn't appear to be quite right. And then it hit me: one of the coamings was "upside down"! Apparently, somehow one of the coamings got the notch at the after end cut on the side of edge of the board that had the sheer, rather than the straight edge.

Needless to say, I was a bit depressed about this turn of events. I pulled to coamings off the boat and headed in tside to mull over my options.

As it turns out, the sheer that we cut in the "toop" edge of the coamings is really quite slight. That's apparently how the thing got cut wroing to begin with: we accidently slapped the template on the comaing the wrong way 'round, becuase the edge with the sheer appeared straight at a quick glance.

By placing the two new coamings together, I was able to determine that it would be possible to just cut a sheer into both edges of each board without taking very much material off, thereby at least having matching coamings. I wasn't really sure how I felt about this "solution," but after sleeping on it, I decided to go ahead and try it.

It was a simple matter to clamp the boards together and match the sheer by removing material using a straight cutting router bit with its bearing riding on the opposite coaming edge. Then we simply had to round over the new edges with a roundover bit. Aggravatingly, while rounding over the new edge, I tore out small section of the edge. Damn splintery wood! A relatively simple repair, but disheartening nonetheless.

Temporary installation

The next step was to install the coamings temporarily so that I could get an accurate measure and fit for the blocks that fill the space between the forward end of the coamings and the side of the house. This required literally jacking the coamings into place to conform to the curve of the cockpit, and fastening them with screws.

I used the jack from my car, but unfortunately my car's jack isn't a bottle jack. The jack that comes with my car is a screw-type jack that works by increasing the angle between two "arms." This turned out to be somewhat problematic, as it caused the 2x4 spreader that I was using to want to rise up and pop loose. Not only would this be annoying, I was afraid that it would be downright dangerous. I found that only a msmall amount of force was necessery to keep everthing in place, so I brought a cinder block up into the cockpit, and tied it to the spreader bar so that it was hanging into the cockpit well. Looks real save, huh?

Once the coamings were jacked into place I put a block on the top edge of the coamings and gently tapped them down with a hammer to be sure that they were seated properly. I then predrilled through the coamings and into the fiberglass and wood backer, then fastened the coamings in place with #12 self-tapping screws and finish washers.

As I was tightening the very last screw, at the forward end of the starboard coaming, I heard a "pop," which turned out to be a small crack running from the forward notch back, following the grain, for about 3 inches. Grrr. The crack doesn't actually go all the way through the board to the outside face of the coaming, and won't really be an issue, but its aggravating anyway. Fortunately (?) all the crack is on the same coaming as the repaired tear-out, as well as a slight stain, so if I decide that I can't stand these things, I'll only have to replace one of the new coamings.

It turns out that depsite my best efforts to maintain a tight fit, for some reason the after ends of both coamings are a bit sloppy . I'm not sure why this is, as the fit appeared very tight when I was rough fitting the coamings. Granted I could only bend the coamings to about 2/3 of the final curve by hand, but I didn't think that the fit would loosen up very much when they were bent the rest of the way. Oh well.

Fitting the Blocks

4/23/03 The next step was to make the corner blocks that fill the space between the end of the coamings and the house. I started by making cardboard templates of the space that I needed to fill. I then was able to glue up 2 blanks of mahogany. The coaming blocks that I built to replace the old ones are only 1 1/2 inch thick, so I was able to simple glue two 3/4 inch thick pieces of stock to get the requisite thickness.

After the epoxy cured, I beveled the top and bottom edges to an angle of 19 degrees on the table saw. I arrived at this angle by eyeballing the angle that "looked right" on the boat, and then measuring the angle. The next step was to use the templates I had made to lay out the cut lines. Then I was able to rough out the blanks. I took the blanks out to the boat, and did the final fitting , which required only a moderate amount of shaping with a block plane and a sanding block.

At this point I removed the coamings from the boat, and brought them into the shop. I mixed up some epoxy thickened with silica and some mahogany wood flour, and glued the blocks into place. I used the cut-offs from roughing out the blanks as cauls for clamping, which worked well. Once the blocks were clamped in place, I cleaned things up as well as I could. In retrospect, I should have masked everything off with tape before clamping, to keep the epoxy off the wood, but no real harm was done.

Change of plan

My original plan had been to fit the top of the coaming blocks with 3/4 inch "cap" pieces, which would be coped to fit tightly to the bullnose of the coaming side. However, after fitting the coaming blcoks, it turned out that I needed almost a full inch of thickness to accomplish this. D'oh! I only had 3/4 inch stock! However, anemail exchange with Tim Lackey netted me some thicker mahogany, left over from his restoration project. Thanks Tim!

With the new thicker stock, I spen t some time trying to cope a nice tightly fitting joint. However, becasue the coaming side angled upwards, but the top of the coaming block was parallel to the deck, I had to cut an angled bullnose cope, and I was n't having much success getting the fit as tight as I wanted it, so it was time for a new plan.

I ended up cutting a notch into the side of the coaming so that the cap piece would be flush with the outside face of the coamings. This left a rectangle of endgrain exposed, but it was a price I was willing to pay at this point!

Because of all the angles, I wasn't really able to clamp the cap piece in place as well as I liked, and eventually I resorted to that great clamp: masking tape. This actually worked pretty well, and certainly applied enough clamping pressure for this particular application.

After some final shaping to ease the shapr edges of the coaming blocks, and fair in the bullnose edge to the cap piece, and a final overall sanding, the new coamings were ready for varnish.

Woodfinish Gloss: Satisfactory

5/18/03 Once the coamings got an overall sanding, they moved up to the varnish room. I hoped to get at least 7 or 8 coats of varnish on before it came time to reinstall them on the boat. To that end, I decided to give the relatively new Epifanes Woodfinish Gloss a try. This product is alleged to be as durable as their traditional spar varnish, but without the need to sand between coats if they are applied within 72 hours. Practical Sailor gave the product a favorable review in their most recent "varnish head-to-head," so I felt reasonably comfortable giving the stuff a shot.

Upon opening the can, it was immediately apparent that the stuff wasn't even remotely the same as the Epifanes high solids, tung-oil based spar varnish. The stuff looks like what I can onlyu describe as thick apple cider. It is reddish-brown, and milky appearing! I was a bit apprehensive about applying it to my new coamings! But I took a deep breath and plunged in. Not to worry; the stuff looked remarkably like regular varnish after it was spread on the wood.

I maintained a pretty aggressive varnsih schedule over the last couple of weeks I had till launching, applying varnish almost every day. The issue was the need to recoat within 72 hours. This wouldn't be a problem except that I was varnishing only one side at atime, so that I could varnish them laying flat, and I was alternating one side to the other. This meant that if I took a day off between each coat, I couldn't get them recoated within the allotted 3 days.

After 5 coats (about 12 days) I took the coamings outside to sand them as flat as I could. Although the Woodfinish was building up a nice coating quickly, it wasn't really getting as flat as I would like for a nice mirror finish. This is one of the drawbacks I found to using the no-sand product. However, after sanding fairly aggressively and laying on 2 more coats, the coamings looked much better.

This fall I plan to take the coamings off and give them another good sanding and lay on a few more coats of varnish. I'm not yet sure if I will switch to the traditional spar varnish or not. I think part of my decision will be based on how well the coating holds up over the summer.

In general, I was quite pleased with the Woodfinish Gloss. It certainly was much easier to get the base coats of varnish on. The two drawbacks that I see are: Not sanding between each coat makes it harder to get a nice mirror smooth finish, and the product seems to be a hair lighter than the Epifanes spar varnish (not substantially so, though). If it holds up as well as the traditional product, I'll be pretty impressed with the stuff.

I didn't get any pitcures of the new installation... I'll try to remember to get some next time I'm on the boat!