Chipping Away

 It has been much too long since I posted, but I have been busy. First off, my fiancee and I got married over the winter! While that occupied much of my time, I did start on the keel work some weeks back also.

I used a furniture dolly and rolling car jack to drag the keel over near my basement for easier access to my tools and compressor. Then came the hard part, grinding and chipping the rust off. I had gotten an estimate of $700 for sandblasting, and that was if I dropped it off and picked it up, but it was just not in the budget. I opted to try my angle grinder with various wheels: metal grinding disc, flap wheel, stripping disc. All worked to varying degrees, but I realized some of the rust was in layers, so I tried a hammer and cold-chisel. It worked well! Then I remembered I had a compressor and pneumatic chisel. Even better!

Still, it took at least six hours of exhausting, messy work to get the keel down to solid cast iron. I finished off with a wire wheel on the angle grinder, then wiped down the whole thing. After gathering up all the removed rust, I weighed it: 28 lbs! 

I decided to add a bronze bushing to the keel pivot bolt hole to form a replaceable wear surface, reduce friction, and hopefully even reduce keel corrosion since the bronze bushing is isolated from the cast iron with epoxy. I first had to drill out the 5/8" hole to 3/4" to accommodate the bushing. Using a cobalt bit and some motor oil for cutting lubricant, I slowly drilled the hole out larger. It took quite a bit longer than I expected, probably an hour total though I took breaks. Finally, the bushing slid right in. Then I removed it temporarily, and cleaned off the oil residue from the keel.

Next, I needed to get the keel vertical in order to be able to finish both sides. I built a cradle out of some scraps of 4x4s and 2x3s I had on hand, but then needed to hold the keel upright to get them in place. I realized there was a heavy-duty eye-bolt on one of my deck joists not far from where I had the keel, so I dragged the keel using the jack and furniture dolly again, until the keel lift point was directly below the eye-bolt. I strung a come-along from the eye bolt to the keel lift chain and hoisted the keel up about a foot off the ground in the vertical orientation. This allowed me to slide the rear cradle in place. The car jack lifted the other end to position the second cradle.

I applied two coats of Ospho rust converter to the whole keel to get all remaining and newly-formed rust. After an acetone wipe-down of the Ospho, I bonded the pivot bushing in place with epoxy/filler, coated the entire keel with three coats of neat epoxy and finally anti-fouling bottom paint.

This whole process happened over several weeks time, mostly on weekends. I also did a few other small improvements during this time, to be covered in other posts.