Port side galley/saloon wall rebuild

[Jeremy Dinsel]

I think that many of us have had some leaks from our port lights. On S/V Whale Shadow, we had one wall that completely failed from the leaks. The marine grade plywood behind the laminate had turned to fibers and dust. When pressing on the laminate, it would bend in place signaling that there was nearly nothing solid beneath it anymore.

We started off trying to remove as little as possible with an oscillating multi-tool, but eventually chose to remove nearly the full port side wall over the galley and salon. I’ve seen reports on this group of people talking about the layer of external gel coat, fiberglass, 1/2” plywood and a thin laminate material and we found a lot of goop around the windows. You can see below that we took the grab rail off the wall. It was glued and screwed to another board. At home, I split them apart with wedges and hand planed the back of the grab rail until it was smooth. I planed another piece of wood and shaped it to match the piece that we removed. We replaced the wall with coosa board.

There was minimal damage to the wood at the base and within the wall, and where any problems existed, we were able to use penetrating epoxy to fix it up. 

Oddly enough, we started this project after the shoulder season ended and have had a large white tarp over the boat during the entirety of the project. For additional protection, we added a small blue tarp taped to the outside of the windows. Both of these helped to keep the windows dry even during some heavy rains in Seattle (and we had at least one unusually heavy rain storm).

Today, we cleaned up the boat and almost put everything back in place (some of the cushions aren’t in their spot as we’re painting the boards they sit on).

A lot of this project was made possible by the information people had shared with this group and we appreciate that information and knowledge sharing. We also used a nice blog report about a couple that did similar work at a yard. They had mentioned a window puller to remove those port lights, but never posted a picture of their device. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to replicate even sight unseen (email me and I can share my design if you think it would be useful). There’s a lot of glue on the port lights and removing them was tricky as the laminate wanted to split and crack as the port was pulled out.

Best regards,

Jeremy Dinsel

S/V Whale Shadow

Passport 40

jeremy...@gmail.com

Best regards,

Jeremy Dinsel

jeremy...@gmail.com