Acquiring a mainmast

The first mast I found for the Glory B was a wooden spar from a 1926 schooner called the "Monsoon", which was broken up in San Leandro after the owner didn't bother to do any repair to her. The mast appeared to be restorable when I first saw it...

The deal I made required me to also take away the foremast, which was rotted away and worthless, and I also got the roller-furling boom, which - while the seams were splitting - also seemed to be repairable. 

Once I got the mast back to the yard, though, I found that it was in much worse state than it at first appeared. Once I removed the mast hardware I found that the seam under the sail track was opened up the whole length of the mast. Rain water from its years sitting on the ground in a San Leandro welding yard had caused rot throughout the length, and the mast was not worth repair.

So, back to the Internet I went looking for another alternative. An ad asking about a mast got a response, and I went up to Petaluma to take a look at a 53' aluminum mast that was available. What I found at first didn't look too promising -

However, on a closer examination and some wading through the reeds, I found that the spar was actually in pretty good shape. There was a 'slight' bow in the mast, but it was right at the spreader points, meaning it could easily be tuned out with the stays.

So, here we go towing the mast from Petaluma back to Berkeley behind my son's pickup. with the masthead over the truck bed and the bottom riding in a dolly we kept under the legal length limit - although we got some funny looks :-)

Here's the boom back in the yard in Berkeley and sitting up on some stands for a better examination. As you can see, the bowing is almost unnoticeable.

The mast is powder coated black, but the coating was in pretty bad shape. I decided to take it off, use an aluminum primer to re-etch the surface, and paint it white.

First, though, I decided to cover over all the areas where hardware had been removed with doubling plates rather than just fill the holes. Since the rig I'm going with will be a single-spreader system, I covered the holes where the upper tangs had been fitted. This might appear 'overkill', but since  I had to remove 3' of the mast anyway for length, I had the aluminum stock on-hand to use. This picture shows one of the plates bedded and installed.

Here we are etched and primed..

Then three coats of polyurethane topsides white gloss, and the mast looks ready to step.

Compression post

Since there had never been a mast stepped - the original builder died before getting that far - there was no hole in the deck, and no mast step. This let me make the decision myself about whether to deck step or keel step. After discussions with the yard staff, including their designer, their looking over the deck construction, and a review of lots of web discussion on the subject, I decided to go for a deck stepped mast. This, of course required the fabrication and installation of a compression post to transfer the deck load down to the floors on the bottom of the boat.

I dusted off my old naval architecture book larnin' from the Acadamy, and calculated what was needed. I looked at the result, scratched my head, and did it again. The result looked FAR too flimsy to the naked eye, so I rechecked a third time, got the same answer, and then asked around. Turned out I was right all along. The strength values for steel are such that all that is actually 'needed' for a compression post is something that just looks completely wrong, and far too small.

I spoke to the fabricator about getting it made up, and he had a piece of 3" square steel tubing just a few inches longer than I needed left over from a previous job. Since he couldn't see a need for a 7' long piece of steel pipe coming up any time soon, he let me have it really cheap. The bottom was welded to a plate cut and sized to span three floors in the bottom of the bilge. Had the boat had a different keel design I might have gone for spanning four, but the floors where the mast goes are sitting directly on the massive oak main keel, so this is fine.

Here you can see also some interesting illustration of the quality of the original work. The copper tubing grounding strap is bolted to about every fourth floor, the whole length of the boat, as well as through the oak main keel to the steel box keel below it. Stray currents are minimal in this boat - even in the very HOT marina I'm in. The pitting in the steel fin keel would have been completely avoided had the previous owner just kept his zincs up!.

 The top was welded to a plate cut to fit between the deck partners, and one side angled down a few degrees to let me rotate the post into place. Here it is screwed to place.

After the foam's put back and the trim and false deckhead replaced, this will look pretty good, and be stronger than needed.

Refloating day

Well, she still floats! First, of course, she had to fly. Double up on the straps on Berkeley's travel lift, and she gently comes up off the stands. After a month out of the water I was a bit concerned about drying, but there was no 'creaking and groaning' at all as she lifted.

The only real problem was that the feet of some of the stands had sunk into the asphalt to the point that it needed crowbars to get them out and move them out of the way :-)

Here they are positioning the straps. Easier to do on the hard than putting them under her for the original lift, relying on old photos to make sure we didn't catch a strut or the drive shaft.

And carefully driving her down to the water.

Unfortunately, there was a big rush around with fenders and stuff, repositioning the straps to lift out the next boat (Another large wooden boat - the ketch "Lydia") and moving my boat out and Lydia in, and I didn't get any pictures of the actual splash.

Here she is back on her dock, though, all shiny white and with a clean bottom, fresh anti-fouling and all new zincs. I had hoped to paint the gunwhale between the rubbing strake and toe-rail black before splashing, but time ran out. Never mind, easy enough to do at the dock.



Ready to splash

Well, just a quick update... anti-fouling is on. Two all-over coats of Trinidad, with a third coat on the leading edges and rudder.

Splash is scheduled for the 25th, to give it two full days to dry before we lift it. At 22 tons, there's a lot of weight on the straps, and I don;t want the paint pulling.

Painting the hull

Well, after four days of very hard work, my sons and I have the boat painted. Three coats of "Blue Sky" high gloss two-part marine paint, in their "brilliant white" color. I guess I should have taken more intermedate pictures, but "Here it is with one coat... here it is with two coats... gets boring. That said...

There she is primed, and...

There she is painted. Give it a day to dry, anti-fouling on, and back in she goes.

Starting the hull painting

Got started on painting the hull today. We've been sanding for days, and today we started priming the area where there was some hull damage on the port side of the bow. (The damage was repaired before I bought her, but never painted)

After priming that a couple of times, sanding back to smooth between coats, repriming it, I got it to a state ready for priming the whole port side of the hull.

Here it is primed and sanded, ready for the gloss to go on. You can see the yellow Stronium epoxy primer on the steel keel, too - I didn't put a picture of that in the keel section of the blog.

Transom refinish

Some 'pretty-work today. The Transom is all grey and faded out, so I decided to go ahead and start refinishing it. Foolishly, I forgot to take a picture before I started, but here's a picture with just the bottom foot or so rough-sanded, showing the state it was all in to begin with....

And here's a close-up showing how the wood cleans up...

The discoloration, though, was just on the surface, so it didn't take much to get it nice. I sanded it first with 120 grit, then 180, and finished off with 220.

I decided to go with a two-part tinted varnish from "Signature Finish", in their honey teak color, since it's a nice light color. Here it is with the first coat applied.

And here after a second. I used an ultra-fine 3M polishing pad between coats, not sure what the grit technically is.

This picture looks darker, but the varnish is still wet. The color is paler than this. So, finally, here it is all finished, dry, and on a sunny day.

And here's another picture of it finished off, showing a nice gloss.



Strut and cutlass bearing

As seen in the earlier post, the cutlass bearing isn't quite properly aligned with the shaft. Luckily, the shaft is riding low in the strut, so I need to lower the strut - a lot easier than raising it.

The strut is held on with 12 Monel bolts, each 14" long, that go right through the hull and the aft floors. In this picture the bolts have been driven about 2" down below the holes from inside the lazarette.

In driving them out, I damaged the thread ends. I took them into a local shop to have the thread ends repaired. (I couldn't get a die to start to repair them manually.) The shop quoted me $75 just to repair the 12 damaged threads, so I asked how much to buy new bolts. Cue hysterical laughter..... Well over $100 per bolt to buy new ones. The budget won't stand for $1500 worth of bolts, so recut the threads it is!

The strut is removed, showing the pads. These are in good clean shape, so a lexan shim, 3/16" thick, on each of these will bring the strut down to the right point.

The strut, fortunately, had been installed after the fibreglass sheathing on the hull, so it dropped right off once the bolts were out.

Here's the strut off the boat. The cutlass bearing has been removed, and it's ready for the new one. This thing weighs about 150 lbs! Good job I had some help dropping it off.

The design has a long shaft, so the strut is truly necessary. In this picture you can see the box keel of galvanized steel.

Here's the strut back in place, shim installed, bedding compound in, and the bolts back. I did buy new nuts, even though I re-used the Monel bolts. Even the damn nuts were expensive enough :-(

Sanding the keel

This being the People's Republic of Berkeley, after all, I can't sandblast the fin keel, as I'd of preferred to, but can only use a wire-wheel in an angle grinder, and even for that I have to tent the whole thing in plastic dropcloths to avoid putting dust in the air.

It's been hot, too. It is SOOOO much fun sitting inside an almost airtight plastic tent in the sun, wearing a respirator, and grinding rust off the steel.

It worked out pretty well, though. Here's the fin keel all wirewheeled down to white metal, and coated with a high zinc rust inhibiting primer.

I'll put a thick epoxy primer over this before I anti-foul, and that - combined with proper attention to the zincs - should prevent the keel from corroding any more. Luckily, the keel is made of really heavy stock - 5/8" steel plate - so the pitting isn't even close to going through. I drilled one small hole through the deepest pit, and the interior - above the poured lead in the bottom - is bone dry.

Haulout day!

Well, it was finally time to get her out of the water and look at the bottom. I had to wait nearly a month for a slot at the boatyard.

Leaving the dock under her own power for the first time since God knows when.

And off across the harbor we go. Looks bereft without a mast.



At the stand-by berth waiting for the lift.

Starting the lift

On the hard and power-washed. Looking better than expected.

The hull is in great condition. Lack of care to the zincs, though, has allowed electrolysis to corrode the steel fin keel. It's pretty pitted, and has lost almost all its anti-fouling.

The cutlass bearing was more worn than you'd expect for so few hours, but the reason is easy to see. The shaft is not centered in the strut, it's riding on the bottom. This will have to be rectified before we relaunch.

Wiring panel

Like a lot of other things on theboat, this is a mix of good and bad.

The original wiring is good. Good solid marine panel, marine grade wiring, soldered joints with waterproofing, top quality components. The original wiring is all run inside bulkheads or above the false deckhead.

Then there's the extra wiring that was added to make the boat more liveable by the last owner. Ordinary domestic extension cords, wire nuts, unlabelled wiring dropping behind cabinetry or running over surfaces. Yuck.


Here's the main panel. The labels were handwritten on scraps of masking tape, and many were illegible. The temporary labelmaster labels are my work till I get engraved ones, and were largely identified by trial and error.

This is the back of the main panel. The nice neat lines and bundles of red and green wires are original. The spaghetti of white indoor extension cord is not.

Main Engine

The engine in "Glory B" is a 1977 Ford Lehman 120HP diesel. It was installed by Ford Industrial Power in 1977 brand new from the factory. Unfortunately, according to letters found on the boat, it was installed wrong. The raw water pump was mis-installed, and as a consequence when the boat was finally launched in 1996 the engine overheated. As a result, there's now an annoying 'tick-tick-tick' exhaust leak noise, and I need to change the exhaust gasket.
Here are a couple of pictures of the engine. Not very exciting, I'm afraid. As of now, the engine has 206 hours on it from new.

More of the interior

Just a few last pictures of how I found it.
Looking down into the aft cabin from the cockpit. There's a berth at the bottom of that pile!












Here's the port side of the aft cabin. There's another single berth under there somewhere!



Almost the only place to see the workmanship in the aft cabin is to look up at the deckhead - everything else is buried in junk.