My original plan was to basically brute force the hull over. I managed to get the boat ready for a flip right around Christmas, and I figured that’d be a difficult time to schedule a bunch of friends to come over, so instead I decided to draft my brother and his family to help. I figured between him, me, and his two kids, that’d probably be enough to muscle it around.
Unfortunately, they kind of balked as soon as they showed up.
With comments complaining about the lack of hand holds and it was heavier then they expected, the boys didn’t exude confidence. My brother was also pretty iffy about it. Rather then force them into something they clearly didn’t have confidence in, I bagged it and came up with a plan B.
Plan B #
Build two gantries out of 2x4s and suspend the boat from them.
The gantries themselves were pretty simple - posts made up of two 2x4s screwed together (two 2x4s were cheaper then a single 4x4 - somewhat unexpected), a top beam then was also two 2x4s, some angle bracing to hold the top beam to the side beams (the top beam was not directly attached to the side beams, it was only held on via this angle bracing), and then between the two gantries on each side I screwed in two 2x4s between them on the diagonals to help prevent buckling. Everything was attached just using a couple of screws.
Here you can see the beams attached on the diagonals between the two gantries
And that was it. I set them up at roughly a third and two thirds of the hull distance from the transom, so one was maybe 3 to 4 feet in from the transom and the other was right around the mastbox, and then used two ratchet straps per gantry to raise the boat. The straps I had weren’t quite long enough so I tied a loop of rope around each gantry and then attached the straps to the rope.
At this point, I lifted the boat high enough (and was happy to see that I could in fact lift it high enough without the cabin top hitting the top of my garage/gantry) to pull the build cradle out from underneath it out into the driveway.
With the garage door open you can see how close I am to running out of room when the boat was raised up high enough to drag the build cradle out
At this point turning the boat began. This was a little harder to do then I expected it would be - in fact, I had to get M to help me out. But the two of us had enough oomph to be able to turn it around in the cradle bit by bit.
The one concerning aspect of this was how warped the gantries became during the process. Everything was vertical and square when we started, but nearing the end the back gantry in particular was really out of plumb and leaning quite a bit. Clearly I needed more bracing.
In order to lower the boat onto the saw horses this is where two straps per gantry came in handy. I would set one strap up loose a little bit below the boat, and then release the other strap so the boat would fall a couple of inches into the first strap, then rinse and repeat. If I did this exactly as described the gantries would moan and squeak and move every time the boat fell and I’d have a minor heart attack - I gradually figured out that I could just grab hold of the strapping before I released it and with whatever strength I had I could slow the descent enough that the entire operation became a non-issue.
So now the boat is flipped and sitting in a very cold garage waiting for the weather to warm up a bit before I start filling and fairing the hull in prep for fibreglassing it. Once the hull is done I’ll likely reuse my gantry setup to flip the boat back right side up for final paint.