Episode 5 Uncle Podger

In considering new names, my wife has suggested Uncle Podger, after the hapless character in Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. I have yet to determine if the new name is to apply to the boat, or to me.

She has also introduced a new word to the English Language - podgering - being the process of making something short and simple long and complicated. She texted me today to wish me well in my podgering, which I took to be a kind remark.

Fixing the keel over the course of several weeks might appear to be quintessentially podgerist, especially to an exasperated wife wanting the full and unhindered use of her new car port. This has been a long tale of attempting to fix one thing and finding half a dozen other things that need fixing first. In my defence, I should point out that I'd prefer to fix all those other things before I put the boat back together again, than to have to take it all apart again at an indeterminate date in the near future.

So, for instance, I asked the paint-shop to supply me with a small quantity of paint to make good a couple of nicks on my newly sand-blasted and recoated keel. The paint needed would have only covered the area of a small coin, but it was necessary to stop the seawater getting to the bare metal and thus initiating a repetition of the dreaded rusting. The paint shop kindly complied but the contingencies of the situation meant that the smallest quantity it could supply comprised a large dollop of bronze epoxy and about half again for the high gloss aliphatic polyurethane top coat, both with their respective hardeners. On hearing about the anti-rusting properties of the bronze epoxy, I seized the opportunity to apply the surplus to the under quarters of my rusting trailer.

This opportunity, however, came at the cost of additional work; the jacking and securing of the trailer at a safe height by shoring for working underneath; the removal of rust by means of a wire brush connected to my electric drill; the painting of the underside; top-coating with spray-on zinc; and removal of shoring, drop sheets and general mess, all of which took about three days.

At the end of Episode 4, I mused that I might rival Michelangelo in his painting of the Sistine Chapel. I believe I have managed to do so, but not in the way I had expected. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel lying on his back, which is the same position I adopted in cleaning and painting my trailer. Except, that I had only a few inches between my nose and the rust flying off the wire brush, leaving me looking as if I had taken up a new career as a chimney-sweep. The aesthetic of my repainted trailer, alas, did not merit a comparison with the Sistine Chapel.

Kessner Tilt Trailer - Underside coated with bronze Intershield 300 by International Paints

The volume of the excess bronze epoxy also, sadly, did not cover the whole trailer, but there was sufficient to cover the areas most affected by rust.

Having de-rusted and re-coated the trailer, I went on to re-pack the Bearing Buddies. These are ingenious devices that use a spring-loaded piston to squeeze grease into the trailer bearings, thus squeezing water out. I had neglected them since they were installed two year's ago, and sensed that they needed some attention. I was not prepared for the gooey mess that ensued. Re-packing the Bearing Buddy requires the removal of a circlip (against which the spring pushes), removal of the piston, reloading the chamber with grease and replacement of the piston and circlip. The mess comes from getting the old blue-grease-rust-mud off the parts and spooning in the new red grease. There is a small hole in the Bearing Buddy that prevents a hydraulic lock, and which allows surplus grease to escape as you compress the spring and replace the circlip. The goo coming out of the hole was at first purple, then red. If it were any other colour, it could have been pigeon-poo.

Bearing Buddy without the plastic cap cover, showing circlip, spring and piston

Having repacked the Bearing Buddies, I then fixed up the mount for the board for the number plate and trailer lights. Previously, the board had been simply attached with pieces of rope, and I thought a more robust (and probably more legal) solution was in order. This was a simple matter of drilling some holes in the steel brackets at the back of the trailer, screwing a couple of pieces of treated pine from some offcuts, and drilling holes for a couple of stainless steel holding bolts with wing-nuts for easy removal. Simple, but another three hours.

Having remounted the number plate board, I decided to go to a weigh bridge to weigh the trailer, without the bunks and without the boat. I have already weighed the two bunks (8 kg each), and when I repeat the exercise with the boat on board, I'll know the weight of the boat. So, I towed it down to South East Queensland Hauliers in Hemmant, and paid $33 to find that the trailer weighs 0.36 tonnes, plus or minus 20kg. So, it could weigh anything between about 0.34 and 0.38 tonnes. Before I got upset about this lack of precision, I reminded myself that weigh bridges are designed to weigh multi-tonne trucks, to which 20kg is a mere trifle.

Having weighed and fixed the number plate board to my trailer, the next thing I did was to unintentionally reverse it into a concrete plinth, whereupon it bent. Thankfully, the damage was almost only cosmetic, and I decided I would not need a new number plate board quite yet.

Boat trailer light board - the unbent side.

None of this, I would argue on at least two counts, is podgering. The first count is that this is useful, if not time-consuming, work that will, hopefully, save me having to revisit it later on. The second count is that I have not commandeered the efforts of the whole household and my neighbours except as required, and only then on discrete occasions. Finally, I have not smashed my thumb with a hammer, though I have come close. I should admit to other mishaps that might qualify, such as getting grey paint on my knee and in the small of my back (the result of wiggling around under my trailer), or losing a drill bit because I was sitting on it.

I must admit to sharing an affinity with Uncle Podger, as he stood back and admired his workmanship. My keel is now back in the boat, and it goes up and down as intended. Small victories indeed.

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You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job. A picture would have come home from the frame-maker’s, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say;

“Oh, you leave that to me. Don’t you, any of you, worry yourselves about that. I’ll do all that.”

And then he would take off his coat, and begin. He would send the girl out for a sixpen’orth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and from that, he would gradually work down and start the whole house.

“Now, you go get me my hammer, Will,” he would shout; “and you bring me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have a kitchen chair, too; and, Jim! You run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell him, ‘Pa’s kind regards, and hopes his leg’s better; and will he lend him his spirit level?’ And don’t you go, Maria, because I shall want somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom! – where’s Tom? – Tom, you come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture.” 

And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief. He could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them. 

“Doesn’t anybody in the whole house know where my coat is? I never came across such a set in my whole life – upon my word I didn’t. Six of you! – and you can’t find a coat that I put down not five minutes ago! Well, of all the –“ 

Then he’d get up, and find that he had been sitting on it, and would call out: 

“Oh, you can give up! I’ve found it myself now. Might just as well ask the cat to find anything as expect you people to find it.” 

And when half an hour had been spent in tying up his finger, and a new glass had been got, and the tools, and the ladder, and the chair and the candle had been brought, he would have another go, the whole family, including the girl and the charwoman, standing round in a semi-circle, ready to help. Two people would have to hold the chair, and a third would help him up on it, and hold him there, and a fourth would hand him a nail, and a fifth would pass him the hammer, and he would take hold of the nail, and drop it. 

“There!” he would say in an injured tone, “now the nail’s gone.”

And we would all have to go down on our knees and grovel for it, while he would stand on the chair and grunt, and want to know if he was to be kept there all evening. 

The nail would be found at last, but by that time he would have lost the hammer. 

“Where’s the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens! Seven of you, gaping round there, and you don’t know what I did with the hammer!” 

We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight of the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down. And  he would take the rule, and re-measure, and find that he wanted half thirty-one and three-eights inches from the corner and would try to do it in his head, and go mad. 

And we would try to do it in our heads, and all arrive at different results, and sneer at one another. And in the general row, the original number would be forgotten, and Uncle Podger would have to measure it off again. 

He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was impossible for him to reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which his head and body struck all the notes at the same time. 

And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand round and hear such language. 

At last, Uncle Podger would get the spot fixed again, and put the point of the nail on it with his left hand, and take the hammer in his right hand. And, with the first blow, he would smash his thumb, and drop the hammer, with a yell, on somebody’s toes. 

Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he’d let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done. 

“Oh! You women make such a fuss over everything,” Uncle Podger would reply, picking himself up. “Why, I like doing a little job of this sort.” 

And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and Uncle Podger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly sufficient to flatten his nose. 

Then we had to find the rule, and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up – very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed by a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched – except Uncle Podger. 

“There you are,” he would say, stepping heavily off the chair on to the charwoman’s corns, and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride. “Why, some people would have a man in to do a little thing like that!”

Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1889

Episode 3 Rust (Part 1)

The most galling thing about a trailer sailer is that the trailer, as the name suggests, makes up about half of it.

Keeping a trailer sailer without a trailer is like keeping a bottle of wine without the bottle. Theoretically, it could be done ("would you like that in a bag, sir?") but, at some point, the practicalities of the situation will force a more conventional outcome upon you.

And, its not as if the trailer is designed in any way to be pleasurable. It has all the grace of an electricity pylon and habitually produces copious amounts of that kind of rusty-grease-mud that perpetually turns up on the one's hands and clothes and gleaming boat parts and car-seat covers. It is the embarrassing uncle that has to turn up for every family Christmas dinner, the tax bill on every pay packet, the manic Monday morning after every balmy Sunday.

Boat trailers, it turns out, are not hard to find if, and this qualification needs to be stressed, you have a motor boat. Snobs and purists (the ranks of which I secretly wish to join) refer to them as "stink boats". Less derogatory language might refer to the motor as an "iron sail". For the sake of world peace, I'll simply refer to them as "other" boats and adopt the politically correctness of the habitual conflict avoider (the ranks of which I have already joined). In any case, the shape of the hull (that part of the boat that gets wet) in these "other" boats is significantly different from sailing boats, and that affects trailer design dramatically. "Other" boats have a planing hull that is typically stamped out of aluminium or steel sheet to form flat-ish surfaces on the boat's underside. Such a hull has as much respect for the water that it is designed to bash through as a hammer has for a nail-head. Because of the planar lines of the planing hull, these boats can be driven directly back onto their trailers with little more that a straight line of rollers or bunks to support them thereon. The boiler-plate hull construction and angle-bracket straight lines makes these "other" boats much quicker to unload and load on their trailers, let alone on the water, and it is the cheapness of their construction, I suppose, that makes them so popular. Looking in used trailer boat yards, like John Crawford Marine, one can estimate that "other" boats outnumber the sailing boats by about ten to one. Commercial realities being what they are, trailer makers now only manufacture trailers for "other" boats and never (or hardly ever) for trailer sailers.

The hulls of sailing boats are the subject of much fascination among sailers, leading designers to all sorts of intricate science and other witchcraft. Fundamentally, though, sailing hulls are not designed for the convenience of being driven up onto trailers with a flat set of rollers and bunks, but are designed to minimise the force needed to ease the boat through the water. Here, we could talk about bow-waves and quarter-waves, tumblehomes and keels, but like all aspects of boat design, everything is really a compromise between the ideal and the practical. For instance, an ideal racing hull is rounded in cross section, rather like the under-quarters of a canoe. The problem with these hulls in trailer sailers is that when loaded onto the trailer, the whole weight of the boat has to sit on tilting rollers. These rollers, in turn press directly onto the surface of the hull, rather than onto some mediating member. Now, because glass reinforced plastic (GRP) hulls tend to creep (deform slowly over time under load), they will get dinted by the pressure of the rollers. To counter this effect, the loads on the rollers are alleviated by providing a cradle on the trailer to support the heavy keel directly, provided it is routinely dropped onto the cradle after use.

In the case of my Austral 20, the boat does not have a nicely rounded cross section, but a skeg keel that forms the rear end of the keel case. This provides a nice flat surface on which the boat can sit, and allows it to sit on an easily-manufactured straight row of rollers arranged down the spine of the trailer. Launching and retrieving is simplified because all you have to do to retrieve the boat is to line up the keel on the rollers and winch it in.

Austral 20 skeg keel on roller bed on trailer. This photo was taken in February 2015 before the trailer rusted further, and needed substantial repairs in September 2015.

These are important facts about trailer sailers that novices, like me, overlook. It becomes even more important when the trailer, like mine, reveals its penchant for producing rust.

This was pointed out to me by a friend after a pleasurable sail, who noticed that the central strut that should have joined A to B was, in fact, cantilevered off A with the joint to B comprising a small volume of rust and a large volume of air. On closer examination, it appeared to have been constructed from fence-post tube and bubble-gum welds. Being a tubular section, the water had got in and had done its dirty work in undetected and uninterrupted seclusion.

At first, I was tempted to accuse the person who had issued the roadworthy certificate of all sorts of wrongdoing. But the certificate was, by then, several months old and the roadworthy certificate does not guarantee any sort of durability. Technically, I believe, all that the roadworthy certificate does is certify that you can drive the trailer onto the road at the instant it is issued without risk of being fined by the Police, who are more interested in lights, brakes and tyres in any case. What happens in the following days, or even seconds is not the certifier's business. So, the prospects for pursuing the owner for selling me a heap of rust-in-the-making appeared poor, and I resigned myself to the costs of repairs.

Austral 20 tilt trailer. manufactured by Kessner, showing signs of rust. More rust was hidden underneath.

I then went about researching trailers. What was the cost of a new one? Between $5K and $10K, depending on how tricky it was to shape the various rollers and bunks to the hull. That's almost as much as the cost of a used trailer and boat, and justifies my earlier comment that the trailer is about half of the trailer sailer in terms of dollar value, if not in frustrated wonderings about where the next thousand will be needed. Further, no one seemed interested in manufacturing tilt trailers, like mine. Tilt trailers have a hinge pin forward of the wheels that allows the rear to tilt down into the water and makes launching much easier and less wet than having to float the boat off the trailer. With a bit of practice, so I am told, you can keep the important things like the bearings and brakes above water, which is a not insignificant fact in terms of their continued functionality.

Having found that new trailers could cost as much as the entire package (hence my comment about them being "galling"), I then asked the wise people on-line about replacing the steel parts with something less prone to the adverse affects of seawater. Aluminium had problems with fatigue cracking and timber had problems with rot (especially in the joints). I suggested that gold might be an ideal material because of its ability to remain untarnished for archaeologically long periods of time, but my ability to source an appropriate amount of the raw material was somewhat limited. It should also be pointed out that the probability of leaving a solid gold trailer parked on the roadside, or by a boat ramp and successfully returning to it after a lengthy sail was disappointingly small. The same could be said of the less expensive approach of using stainless steel. So, I was stuck with mild steel and the problem of how to stop it rusting.

Being disposed toward the miserly, I opted against hot dip galvanising, which would have raised the cost of repairs to something like a new trailer, and employed Brisbane Axles and Trailer Components (BAT) to cut out the rusty members and replace them. My one modification to the design was to replace the central fence-post tubular strut with a "C" section that had the "C" pointing down so that it would not retain water. BAT did a splendid job, and finished it off with "cold galvanising", which involves smothering the metal with zinc sprayed from a can. You need a large number of cans, and you need to re-smother regularly. My re-smothering habits lapsed the moment I got the trailer home. The cost of the repairs was $2500, which is less than a new trailer, and I got to keep the tilt-trailer mechanism and the rest of the gubbins that were tailored to my hull.

Almost two years on, the trailer is rusting again, though not as badly as before. It is amazing how quickly these things degenerate. In my defence, the location of my parking spot is directly adjacent to the saltwater in Manly harbour, but my to do list has another problem looming. I wonder how long I can procrastinate before further repairs or clean-ups are required?

Austral 20 trailer, after repairs in tilted position. Trailer at home.

Post script: I have been informed (by a fellow customer in a nut and bolt shop) that the cost of hot-dip galvanising can be about $2:70 per kg. So, if the galvanisable part of your trailer is about 370 kg, the cost of acid-bathing and galvanising is about $1000.