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I just spent the past 4 days wearing a tyvek suit grinding out the bottom of my Etap 26 retractable keel boat. The entire keel trunk was heading south. It had already moved about 1". A very simple case of TCDA (Terminal Case of Dumb Ass) The idiot that designed this boat should have been hung! Today I started glassing in the repairs.
Boats with bad keels seem attracted to me. The 1976 Hunter 27 I owned in 1982 also had the keel nearly fall off. The pictures of the Oday are very reminesent, except the TCDA of that Hunter design was right off the charts! I had to cut the entire floor out of hte boat to get to the repair area. 3 five gallon buckets later I had a clean hull and started rebuilding the stringers from scratch. I sold the boat to a guy who sailed it from NJ and back 3 times. he called me 8 years later to tell me the bilge had water fro the first time. It turned out the rubber conveyor belt I used under large stainless plates to protect the glass had dry rotted. He replaced that and the boat was completely dry again.
I am very surprised that you don't hear more about keel design flaws from surveyors. There are a hee lof a lot of boats out there with really bad engineering on the keel supports.
I will post some before and after pictures of the repair job I am doing now.
Gary H. Lucas
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