Question to those who epoxied the frame on a H16
This is my plan for this weekend.
I am going to epoxy the frame, but I will only epoxy certain parts at a time, not the entire frame. So here goes
Frist up, I will epoxy the rear, left and right bars together with the pilons. I will do this on the floor of my garage wiich is straight and level. After the epoxy sets and cures I will expoxy the front bar. once this sets and cures, I will have the entire tramp frame epoxied.
Then I will install the tramp and tight as posible. Then I will bring it out to the boat, level her, and then finally epoxy the assembled frame onto both hulls.
Is this feasable? I know its going to take longer this way, but the weather has been acting up in South FL its been raining everyday for last three weeks. I prefer to do it in my garage wich is nice and dry, compared to outdoors and all the rain.
Any thoughts?
Whoa, Tiger!
You're making this a lot harder than it needs to be.
First of all - the sidebars don't need to be glued. They are not structural to the stiffness of the boat. Secondly, unless the rivets are loose in the castings, the castings don't need to be glued to the crossbars. Even so, usually the rear crossbar / castings are the only ones that need gluing together since the front is held together pretty tightly with the dolphin striker.
So here's what you should do -
- Glue the castings on to the crossbars (only if necessary)
- Clean the pylons and the pylon sockets in the crossbars with a degreaser (Engine Brite works really well - get it at an auto parts store)
- Coat the pylons with Vaseline to facilitate later disassembly
- Mix the epoxy with a thickening agent (colloidial silica) until it's the consistency of peanut butter and apply it liberally to the pylon sockets in the corner castings
- Assemble the entire frame on the boat (bring the boat into the garage and have it on the floor - use carpet scraps to pad the bottoms), making sure that the castings are seated completely down on the pylons
- Level and square the boat and leave overnight to cure
- Install the trampoline and tighten it as tight as you can get it. A trick used by the factory is to rig your mainsheet to pull a line looped around the sidebars to bow them inward while you tighten the tramp. When you let it go, the sidebars spring out and the tramp is tighter than you could ever pull it by hand.
You can be sailing on Sunday if you start on Saturday morning!
I guess I did not make my self clear on the front bar epoxy assembly comment. I am not going to epoxy the fron bar, I could never get it apart anyway so I figured that bad boy is in pretty darn tight.
I was thinking about epoxing the side bars, but as you state it has no effect on the stifness.
So I shall follow your recommendation and do that. Sounds much easier and quicker.
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