Archive for the 'T30 issues' Category
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
demolition
To get better idea of what I’m dealing with in terms of putting in the engine I took the old nasty water tank out today.
It really is kind of amazing how much space this liner construction wastes not to mention how hard it makes it to reach anything without major demolition work. Also notice the mold in the fresh water tank! mmmmmm tasty.
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
tiller bumper
After working on the aft section, fairing up the remaining patches on the starboard side, and adding the second stage of toe rail goop (pretty much just colloidal silica with some milled fiber thrown in for shatter resistance) I decided to take care of one of my biggest peeves about the T30, the tiller. Actually it’s not specifically the tiller but the area that the tiller connects at. It seems that no matter how expensive the T30, no matter how well maintained it is, this area always looks like it was smashed with a… well… tiller!
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
The Y30? T30? S&S 30??
Now I knew that those guys at S&S were good, but I didn’t realize just how prolific they were. The Tartan T30 is one of their designs of the MORC (Miget Off-shore Racing Class) era of the 1970’s. Strong built hull, long fin keel, skeg rudder, head sail driven, the cool center placement of the engine, the whole 9. Here’s what the profile drawing looks like.
Now here is another boat called the Yankee Y30.
Now here’s where it gets interesting
Monday, August 27th, 2007
Deck joint repair
Oh hull to deck joint, why were you so well made? Couldn’t you have been made with only a couple of bolts? 3″ on center sounds great and hold wonderfully, but when you are doing a rebuild, its a lot of work. And what about that inside tabbing? It was a great idea at the time and I’m sure it served for 2 or 3 decades, but eventually ice expansion rendered it useless. Now I have to pull it off with pliers and a chisel so I can service the bolts underneath. Oh cruelly well designed deck joint!
Sadly the joint has pretty much completely failed due to the death of the sealing mastic that Tartan used between the hull and deck segments. It was some sort of oi-based caulking so I’m going to have to remove it to fix the joint. What I really want to do though is to just seal the whole thing inside and out with fiberglass. My only issue is if I have to remove the bolts before glassing or if I could just do a rough grinding right over the bolts and gel coat and then just glass it all together. A big new wooden (ipe?) rub rail is going to cover the joint after it’s all glassed up so I doubt that it will have too much exposure. One the inside I’d do a tabbing job like Tartan’s original only with some heavy epoxy compatible matt or some biax. Any ideas?
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
Stringer re-core
Today I spent the whole day rebuilding the balsa cored stringers that ripped out back in July.
Back when I was first diagnosing the damage to Hobyn I noticed a black seepage coming from various parts along the hull. It looked like it was coming from absolutely no where but then I realized that these areas were the bottoms of reinforcing stringers. I guess in order to save weight (and costs since resin costs more than core material) and increase stiffness the guys at Tartan put these huge stringer panels into the topsides of the T30. The thing is that while they did a good job, no job is flawless and this job is 34 years old…
What happened is that water leaked in through the hull to deck joint and saturated not only the balsa core but the plywood cored stringers that run right under the deck joint. I know what you’re thinking “wait a sec, isn’t the wood protected from water by a layer of fiberglass and resin?”. Well yes, yes it is, however the a tiny bit of water that accumulated + freezing temperatures (this is a northern climate boat) equals tremendous force that basically popped the fiberglass apart in places. Read the rest of this entry »