Good afternoon. The big mission this summer on our Roughwater 33 is to seal the
boat up so that the rain and sea-water stay out of the
boat for this coming
winter. When we bought the boat all the
hatch seals were shot, all the
deck hardware needed re-bedding, the wooden rub rail fastener holes leak into the inside of the
hull, etc... Typical 35+ year old boat that hasn't had a major
refit.
We have a
teak foredeck
hatch main
companionway hatch and aft lazarette hatch that all have similar seal setups, there is an 1/8" rabbet routered or chiseled into the perimeter of these hatches and they had 1/8th solid rubber
seals glued into them. All the rubber has now gone brittle and mostly cracked and I have had a hell of a time finding simple 1/8" rubber seals online and in the local chandleries. Almost nobody seems to carry solid rubber anymore, seems to be this neoprene foam hollow cored stuff that everybody is using. But even with that, none of the chandleries carried anything as narrow as 1/8", it is 1/4" and above.
My questions are, is there an online source where you can get plain old 1/8" solid rubber seal material? My instinct would be that the solid rubber would last longer than the soft neoprene foam seals, but correct me if i'm wrong.
Also our
engine room access is a heavy duty
aluminum manhole with three turning
dogs, with the same 1/8" rubber material, now long gone, I've tried to seal it with a 1/4" neoprene seal on the underside of the manhole cover, not quite right as the original seal is yet again, inside an inset channel on the
deck plate part, not the lid, so of course it doesn't seal quite right.
I was doing some reading on the neoprene seals and it seems like some of them are not supposed to be compressed too much, to seal properly, only 25-40 percent of their height or something like that. I think that design is at variance with the manhole cover as it is obvious that it was designed to be dogged down tightly over the rubber seal. So that might be why the neoprene on there isn't fully sealing.
This is definitely the non sexy side of what we need to do on our boats, but so necessary to prevent future issues and living in a damp
environment. Can't wait to have a dry boat!
Cheers
Ryan