Another typical boat project

10/7/15
Southport NC
Posted by Bill

After spending most of 3 days inside the boat waiting out the record rains it was nice to get out in the sunshine! Fortunately for us we did not have any issues related to the floods, wind and rain, other than a few nights of poor sleep. The temps and humidity have been fantastic as well and we have had the air conditioning off and hatches open.

So now that the hatches are open and the weather is nice, I decided to tackle a long running boat project… fix the broken hatch hinges. The hinges that hold the hatches open are attached to the hatch frame in the deck by pop rivets. After 20 years, the original rivets started breaking, rendering the hinge useless. In the last 8 months we had 3 hatches fall victim, and we have been propping them up with wood sticks or using a bungee chord to hold them open from above. It hasn’t been a huge deal since we have them closed with the A/C running since May, so it hasn’t been a top priority. We weren’t able to find out what size rivets we needed from any of our internet resources, including Island Packet forums, so I took the pieces of a broken one and determined the size based on that. I must first confess that I don’t know too much about rivets except the general physics of how they work, and I have only used a rivet gun a couple of times. This is the perfect setting for a typical boat project.

After the initial trip to Lowes to procure the rivets, I took apart the first hinge. Step two is to clean out the holes where the rivets go, as I had temporarily plugged them with silicon so we didn’t have water leaking in every time it rained, and there are remnants of the broken rivets that can be in the way. On this hatch, that material gets trapped by a metal bracket that appears to be screwed to the deck frame. No problem right…just remove the screws and pull the bracket off…clean up the fragments. NOT! The bracket is welded to the frame. Ok…rebed the deck screws so they don’t leak, then try to use probes to fish out the stuff you need to remove through a tiny slot and the rivet holes. Thanks to Tricia’s help we cleared most of it out in 30-40 minutes. I basically had to rivet this plastic piece to the frame:

Then re-assemble the hinge and attach it back to the hatch lid. You will see that the holes in the plastic piece are rough around the edges. The next challenge we hit was that the rivet gun was not deep enough to reach the rivet collar through the recess. My first approach was to go back to Lowes and buy some washers that would fit over the rivet mandrel and in essence, extend the rivet collar to the gun:

In the second attempt, the washers shortened the rivet mandrel to the point that it was too short for the gun to work. Taking some measurements, I needed 12mm to reach the rivet in the recess of the plastic piece, and the die in the gun was only 6mm. I tried to knarl out the recess holes (hence the rough edges in the picture) to gain more depth with the gun, but to no avail. Plan B…tap out the holes in the hatch frame and fasten with machine screws. I have a tap and die set, but I have never used it and I was concerned about learning on the hatch frames due to the high cost and labor required to replace them if I screwed up. After a couple of hours of research I decided to call a place that sells the hinge repair kits, and I found someone who told me the trick to using a rivet gun to do the job…grind the end of the gun to make it fit the recess. That ain’t happening on this boat. After another hour of research and thinking, I figured that maybe I could pull the rivet mandrel half way through the motion of the gun, open the gun to re-position it against the washers again, and repeat until the mandrel was long enough to be gripped by the gun to complete the process. Not working as the rivet is not gripping the back side of the frame. After a couple of more attempts, research and thinking, it looked like the rivet may not be long enough. Learning more about rivets, it seems that you need about a quarter of an inch longer than the real length needed to sufficiently mushroom the end of the rivet. We were just a little shy of that. Back to Lowes to get longer rivets. Using the same process as before and the longer rivets…Viola!! Success!! The biggest hatch had two hinges and the next bigger on had one. After completing those, and feeling pretty good, I get to the last one that needed repaired…a small hatch. No access behind the holes to get the previous rivet remains out and they are blocking the holes. I figure I can drill them out. It takes 10 minutes to dig the drill and bits out of storage only to find out that the drill and bit combined are too long to fit in the hatch opening, thus keeping me from the task at hand. I dig out my other drill…no luck. What I need is a right angled drill. So I take two out of three as success for the day and call it quits until I find a right angled to borrow, and as usual, it takes almost a full day to fix two hatches! Typical boat project.


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