Finishing the centerboard pin

When last we left the centerboard pin, I had glued in the bushings in place to the centerboard case but I feared accidentally gluing the pin itself into the bushings, so I pulled it out before the epoxy dried. And what do you know, as I pulled it out I must have nudged one of the bushings and they were no longer in alignment. Damn.

So first step was that I needed to drill the glued bushings out. For that I needed a real drill bit instead of a forstner bit.

There wasn’t much to it at this point aside from line it up, brace the drill so I didn’t wreck my wrists on the torque, and drill. I originally thought I’d only drill out one side and keep the other for alignment, but I decided to drill out both sides and redo them both. As it happened, both sides required drilling through roughly half the length of the bushing before the remaining broke free from the epoxy and popped out.

After that, I decided I needed to fill both holes in the centerboard case so I could re-drill them hopefully aligned. This turned out to be a little difficult but eventually I managed to get (my neighbour Jeff) to reach up into the centerboard case and apply backing tape on both sides to each hole so that I could stuff in some epoxy on either side.

It’s getting relatively cold now in Seattle, and my garage isn’t heated, so I need to add heat every now and then to get epoxy to cure (especially when I’m still using slow hardener as I was for this - I’ve since switched to fast). My normal setup for this is to just use some shop lamps with 100 watt light bulbs in them - cheap and they work like a charm.

I’m almost out of 100 watt bulbs and it’s hard to find incandescent bulbs anymore - I might have to switch to the ceramic heat bulbs soon.

I obviously had to buy new bushings for this so this time I bought some bushings with collars on them. I figured that the collar would at least help prevent excess epoxy spillage on one end as the bushing is pressed into the hole, a point on which I was proven right.

Next was to figure out what drill bit to use for drilling the hole. The outside diameter of these bushings was 5/8" of an inch, but I had some issues earlier with them fitting in the centerboard itself. So since I now had a forstner bit, a spade bit, and a regular bit, all 5/8", I did an experiment.

I’m glad I did the experiment. The forstner bit generated a hole that was a little too small! No wonder the bushing didn’t fit!

The regular drill bit required a half inch chuck in the drill and my little drill press designed for hand held drills only has a 3/8" chuck, so I was going to have to use my spade bit. Also, since the spade bit wasn’t long enough to drill through one side of the centerboard case and continue on and drill the far side hole in the same motion, I was going to have to use a pilot hole with a smaller extra long bit. So that’s what I did.

Drilled the pilot hole, then put in the spade bit and drilled from both sides using the pilot hole, then did a loose fit of the bushings in each side with the pin through both - it lined up nicely.

Gluing them up still had me concerned that as I pushed the bushings into position some epoxy would splurge out and get into the bushing itself and possibly glue the pin in place to the bushing (I was definitely going to leave the pin in this time while waiting for the epoxy to cure to ensure alignment).

I wound up dealing with this by putting a circle of tape over the end of each bushing. I then coated the bushing and the inside of each hole in epoxy, and pushed the bushings in. When I put the pin in one side, it pushed the tape off the end of the hole in that bushing, taking any excess epoxy with it. I inserted the pin into each bushing and reached up into the centerboard case each time to remove the piece of tape from the pin without getting any epoxy onto the pin itself, and then inserted the pin through both bushings to ensure alignment.

With the bushings glued in and lined up, last step was to put the access covers on.

I decided a while ago that I didn’t want to go the bolt route since that seemed to leak on a lot of people and I’m not interested in that. Instead I went with ordering a stainless steel rod from McMaster Carr and putting a sea dog garboard drain and plug on each side. Why one on each side? Well to get the centerboard pin out there will be enough pressure from the weight of the centerboard that I likely won’t be able to just pull the pin out, but rather will need to push it out from one side.

Before I went this route I discovered that you could order what are called “dowel pins”, specifically “pull out dowel pins” from McMaster Carr that are similar but have a tapped drilled hole on one end so that you can thread in a screw or similar to get enough purchase to be able to pull it out. Using one of these might mean I’d need access to only one side of the centerboard pin to pull it out instead of both sides to push it out (meaning I could completely seal off one side of the pin). I ordered one of these (actually I ordered two), only to find that they were slightly bigger then 1/2", meaning neither of them fit through the bushings whereas the stainless rod did. So I just gave up on this route.

If I were to do it again I might try again to go this route, perhaps with oversized bushings to make sure the pull out dowel pin fits, but in the end I’m not too worried about these garboard plugs leaking (easy enough to just put some teflon tape on them if they do), so having one on each side of the centerboard case I think will be fine.

Of course I just looked at my receipts and noticed I bought the dowel pins as 18-8 stainless instead of a 316 - another reason not to use them. Sigh.

In order to actually glue these on to the centerboard, particularly on the outboard side, I needed some rather long wooden braces that would hold it with pressure and reach all the way across to my fixed work bench…

Centerboard itself

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For the centerboard itself, I had thought to glue the bushing into the centerboard and then hang it in the case from the dowel pin so tha it could dry all installed and lined up, but decided that was going to be too hard with too much risk that epoxy might squeeze into somewhere I didn’t want it and glue bad things together.

So instead I just glued the bushing into the centerboard, inserted the dowel pin, and used a square to make sure the pin was coming out of the bushing perfectly straight, meaning the bushing was glued in at perfect right angles to the face of the centerboard.

For the haul up line, I decided I’d once again use the drill/fill/drill technique to put a hollow on one side of the board so that the haul up line could be threaded into it and a stopper knot tied. I started with a 1" forstner bit that I then filled with epoxy and drilled out again with a 7/8" forstner bit. Again this only goes just a bit past half way through the board.

You can see in the last picture that there was a small bubble in the filled epoxy. when I drilled the guide hole from the edge of the centerboard into this and filled it, I also filled out this void and redrilled the 7/8" hole smooth afterwards.

I’ll probably do one final coat of at least the path for the haul line with graphite epoxy. Maybe. The non black epoxy looks a little weird, but it is on the centerboard that nobody is ever going to see…