pirate ship
Greetings from Chile!
About a year ago, my brother and I started restoring an old larch Pirat Class sailboat, which was in "flowerpot state". From the pictures you can see how damaged it was, despite it looked well from the orange outside. But the interesting thing was: The larch hull was almost completely well. The eleven stations were rotten and the boat was pretty cracked, but everything was repairable!
We started cleaning it all, sanding the paint out to see the wood underneath it. Then it was time to replace the rotten stations. The procedure was: hammering (yes, with hammer) out the old station, cutting out the new one, assembling it over the wood, epoxying the joints and screwing in some bronze screws. The same procedure, 11 times!
After about 2 months, the stations were in their place. Then, we flipped the boat upside down. We realized that some parts of the hull wood were actually rotten, so we took them away and replaced them with some old larch from another Pirat boat that rested in the same state as ours. Then, upside up once again. The patches had to be screwed down together. Otherwise, they will crack again and water will come inside. We put an 1" wood tick over every joint and screwed it. Step by step, it seemed to look like a actual boat again. We build the pivoting daggerboard case out of 18mm thick plywood and installed it. After that, the floor beams were in place. The reinforcements for the deck and the watertight front-and-aft compartments were then installed.
Up to date, there were 365 hours needed. We should now patch the little cracks on the hull, bulk the joints from the outside with sikaflex, sand everything down, varnish it and fit the deck and hardware. If everything goes well, we should be settings sails in September!
I hope you like the work. I hope, also, that you motivate yourself with a project like this. It has been a GREAT experience! It’s a shame that great boats end their lives like this one, but is amazing to be bringing it back alive! – Anarchist Gustavo.
