I am doing a refit on a well abused Hobie 16. The chainplates on the boat seem to be threaded eyes which screw into stainless rods held in place by the hull/deck joint lip. The previous owner had epoxied these stainless rods in place and did an ugly job. I would like to unscrew the threaded eyes, pop out the rods, clean the whole area out and replce it all without all the epoxy. Can anyone tell me why this is a bad idea?
It's not a bad idea - just difficult to accomplish, depending on how tenacious that epoxy is.
The standard method of getting epoxy to release from metal is to heat it with a torch, but the anchor rods are too deep under the deck lip to do that. Flame and polyester resin do not mix. You'd end up setting your boat on fire.
Induction heating might work - running an electric current through the shroud anchor, but that's something I've never seen done before.
Once you get the anchor rods out, you could clean up the area with a Dremel tool.
How about a photo?
My photo technology is limited to a broken digital camera and a fuzzy phone camera. I will attempt to remove them with some gentle "persuasion" before resorting to torches and the like. Looking at the epoxy job, I doubt it was prepped for proper bonding to anything and should not put up too much of a fight.
Thanks for the input.
I'd leave them in place, and try to make them look pretty.
If you are DESPERATE to remove them, I'd go the physical route and leave the heat and chemical method behind.
After removing the threaded bolt, I'd try punching it out. Put a punch on the end of the rod, then hit the punch swiftly with a heavy hammer.-It's the old 'pull the tablecloth out from under the dishes' trick. If you do it quickly, inertia will leave the dishes behind. Hopefully, just some gelcote will be stuck to the epoxy, but no guarentees.
Quite glad I did this. The first side came right out with unscrewing the eye and tapping with hammer and drift. The other side had obviously been replaced before because the eye, which has a different profile than the first, must be made of inferior grade stainless. It sheared right off and removing the rod showed heaps of rust. Better this happened among the leaves next to my house than on the water.