Removing The Bilge Plate Shoes

On this day, I decided to do some preliminary “poking around” to get a feel for what kind of condition “ElizaLin’s” hull was in.  Of specific interest was the area that is referred to as the “garboard / keel joint”.  On old wooden boats, this joint is notorious for breaking open and letting water in. On the wooden versions of the Golden Hind 31′, the exterior of the hull was covered with a product that I think was called, “Cascover”.  I believe this was a nylon fabric bedded into some kind of glue. On “ElizaLin”, the covering was breached along the garboard / keel joint and water had worked its way up between the fabric and the exterior surface of the plywood sheathing that makes up the hull.  This covering needed to be removed.

This is the garboard / keel joint that I am referring to, just above my fingers.

Here you can see that the original protective covering has broken down and separated from the plywood hull.

The removal of the loose covering was not much different than removing old canvas style wallpaper.  Just rip and tear!

I also did some removal of the old covering and old bottom paint with a putty knife and chisel.

To remove some of the decomposed “gunk” out of the garboard / keel joint, I used an old trick of creating a “reefing tool” out of the tang of a hand file.

I bent the tang of the file over in my shop vise.

Then, I ground a “blade” on the tang’s tip using my bench grinder.

A file repurposed to a reefing tool always works great!

I also did some exploring with my 8″ grinder; working down the old material covering the deadwood.

But, my real focus of the afternoon was to try to remove the starboard Bilge Plate Shoe.  To do this, I used my 4″ Makita grinder to clean off all of the “old scale” and bedding compound from the face of the shoe.

This work exposed the heads of a few fastenings at the very ends of the shoes.  I tried to back them out with a screwdriver, but the fasteners were just too corroded and they broke underneath the efforts of me trying to remove them.

“Plan B” led me to cut some wedges from a scrap piece of 2 x 4.

Using a hammer, I drove several of the wedges between the shoe and the hull to begin to force the mating joint apart.

This process revealed that there were other fastenings that were holding the Bilge Plate Shoe to the hull.  These fastenings needed to be located and removed for the Bilge Plate Shoe to drop away from the boat.

Here is one of those fastenings.

I cut that screw and drove more wedges between the shoe and the hull.  I didn’t get very far before I quit for the day.  The Maine mosquitoes were getting the better of me!