Recent content by Syncrowave

Part 16 is a floor. :wink:

Space Blanket Extra Glasses (if you wear them) in case your regular pair falls overboard (Murphy's Law dictates this will happen at worst possible time) Ditch the matches and magnesium rigmarole and substitute 2 Bic lighters. Strobe and batteries for SAR I would ditch the toruniquet and gauze...

I'd try to get a boat with a beam of 48" rather than 36" at a minimum. The 48" wide boats are more stable than the 36" wide ones.

I'd probably go with some kind of epoxy repair, adding in new metal and gluing it in place (possibly with some rivets), rather than welding. Welding, especially on used boats, can be dicey. It also normally weakens the metal in the area adjacent to the weld (HAZ or Heat-Affected Zone).

I don't know whether perforated aluminum would be good or bad, but for a source I would try steel yards / steel service centers in your area. They might carry it. Google your Yellow Pages under "steel service centers." In steel, there's a product called "expanded metal" and it looks like this...

Basically you put the rivet through the hole, then you put the "bucking bar" (or the head of a sledgehammer, or any heavy piece of steel to act as an "anvil") on the side that the rivet head is on, then you use an air hammer (or a ball-peen hammer) to beat on the other end of the rivet, to...

I've been boating in saltwater most of my life and I have never heard of this. I've heard of bonding everything metal that goes through the hull together, so that you don't need to attach a zinc anode to every seacock and through-hull fitting, but never that it should be connected to the...

I've been told that modern PT wood is a no-no around aluminum because they outlawed the chemical that was originally used to treat PT wood with (arsenic or some compound of it?), and now the chemical they use instead contains copper, which will eat through aluminum like nobody's business due to...

I'm no expert by any means, but I suspect real aluminum rivets (which would be peened over) would be preferable to pop-rivets. I think real rivets are generally thicker where they go through the metal, and the peened-over head holds better than the swaged tube that's left on one side of a pop-rivet.

Thank you all for the replies, folks. Thudpucker, I'm surprised as heck by your reply about bronze below the waterline. Theoretically, at least, bronze (because it is largely copper) should gobble up aluminum like there's no tomorrow in an electrolytic environment. But I guess your experience...

Hey, all, new guy here. I've been boating a long time but mainly in FG boats. Just got a new alum jon boat (Lowe L1648) and I am rigging it, and I want to fabricate an aluminum box to attach the outboard control box to. The sides of the hull are at too much of an angle leaning outboard to...