Toerails and sail tracks

[edrads]

I''m in the process of putting a new deck on my Rhodes Chesapeake 32. The original design had sail tracks attached to the toerails. Both the toerails and the sail tracks were fastened through the deck (which, by the time I purchased her, leaked maddeningly.)

In her new incarnation, I''m thinking of mounting sail tracks directly on the deck. If I do that, and make sure that there are no other points on the toerails that support a heavy load, can I fasten (epoxy???) the toerails all the way around without putting bolts through the deck?

[loki]

Epoxy is great stuff for sticking things together but I think you would be pushing your luck to trust your sail track to it. It is brittle and when failure occured it would be sudden, total, catastrophic and inopertune. This is why you would not see such a setup on a production boat. Consider a good sealant to use with bolts.

[edrads]

Thanks, Loki. But I wasn''t suggesting using epoxe to mount the sail tracks -- I was asking if I could mount most sections of the toerails that way.