Hatches

... are a PITA. Why is this so? Because they are the most used bits on the boat and get battered about. And, because they have so many surfaces to build/repair/paint. Think about it - maintaining a piece of deck involves a single surface. If we count every facet of a simple square hatch, including edges and each side of the combings, we have fourteen individual surfaces to deal with! Consider that this is true whether we are talking about a hatch that is 1 foot square, or 10 feet square. In fact, in relative terms this means that a small hatch is way more work than a large hatch for its area.

So, after 5-6 years, the hatches on Little Cat are truly battered about. The worst are the foredeck hatches which I am overhauling first. All of the contact combing areas are raw splintered wood now. All of the epoxy and glass has been knocked off via uncounted removals and refitting of the hatches.

The initial question is, repair or replace? I chose repair, but in hind sight replace would have been less work – don't take my word for it – try it yourself. However, I had another motive for repair – a grand experiment. Little Cat is made of Douglas Fir marine ply (DF). DF is a very good boat building material but checks. That is, after time the fibers of wood lift. If the wood is just epoxy coated, checking causes hairline cracks in the surface. Usually, if the wood is glassed it does not check. On my hatches, however, the glassed external surfaces have checked and caused cracks in the fiberglass. Even though the only glassed-wood checking on Little Cat has occurred on the hatches, I wanted to test the repair techniques for checked DF, in case checking occurs somewhere important on the boat.

The West Manual, says that when checks occur in DF to dig them out using a V-shaped scraper and to fill them with thickened epoxy and repaint. Easy right? Except they don't elaborate whether they are talking about a glassed or unglassed surface! So, on the port hatch, I gouged out a deep crack through the glass, filled it with thickened epoxy and painted it like that.

Port hatch before paint, no new glass layer

On the starboard hatch. I gouged the many splits, refilled them, and then glassed it over again.

Starboard hatch glassed over after repair

Warning, these pictures do not do justice to the RIDICULOUS amount of work to get them to this ready-to-paint stage! This is what I mean by it would be easier to start from scratch and make new ones. Anyway, now I have a living experiment. As time goes by I can watch how these repairs age, and maybe find out if re-glassing is required, or whether a gouge-out and repaint is sufficient in DF checking repairs.