Notice:
The advice given on this site is based upon individual or quoted experience, yours may differ.
The Officers, Staff and members of this site only provide information based upon the concept that anyone utilizing this information does so at their own risk and holds harmless all contributors to this site.
A clunking keel led me to drop the pivot assembly a few weeks ago and revealed that a 1" hole in the keel was now a slightly irregular 1 1/8" hole. I dropped the keel again yesterday and spent a delightful afternoon with my 1/2" drill and a 1 1/4" drill bit. CD suggests having the hole drilled by a machine shop and press fitting the sleeve, but with available epoxies having 3000+ lb. tensile, 20000+ lb. shear, and 40000+ lb, compression strengths per square inch, I decided that hand drilling and epoxy adhesive was a viable alternative. Hand drilling resulted in a snug sliding fit, so I happily mixed the epoxy, coated both surfaces liberally, and positioned the stainless sleeve. The epoxy adhesive I used had a 4 hour setup time and a 24 hr. cure, so I was done for the day, Unfortunately, that is when it occurred to me that pictures would have been a good idea. Today got off to a pretty easy start - grind off the excess epoxy, polish the stainless, insert the pin, add new spacers, and replace the castings, jack the keel back up with my trusty Walker 4 ton floor jack and insert new bolts. Insert new bolts was my downfall. Alignment is not that easy. An hour of moving and chocking the jack for fore and aft, raising and lowering the keel onto a jackstand to move it athwartship, and 4 long bolts for final alignment finished my morning. I removed the long bolts one at a time and replaced them with the original mounting bolts and snugged them down to hold everything in position. The final step was removing the original bolts one at a time and replacing them with the new bolts with primer and Loc-tite. Overall, it wasn't such a bad job; except for the slow setup of the stronger epoxy, it could have been done in one very tiring day, but my 64 yr. old body appreciated the forced delay
Dave B. aboard Pearl 1982 TR/SK/Trad. #3399 Lake Erie/Florida Panhandle
I might be an old swinger too, but I'm not better than new. I do agree that the keel is better than new. A stainless sleeve is much more durable than cast iron
Notice: The advice given on this site is based upon individual or quoted experience, yours may differ. The Officers, Staff and members of this site only provide information based upon the concept that anyone utilizing this information does so at their own risk and holds harmless all contributors to this site.