Messing about in boats...Restoring a 1964 Ensign

“There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing than messing about in boats” - Kenneth Grahame

....When you have a good old boat, there's a lot of messing necessary

Calypso on the St. Marks River on her way to have a little work done.

 

With AQUAVIT in storage in Maine til next summer, and Bay Breeze at Sailors Wharf Boat Yard in St Petersburg waiting for us to begin our spring cruise, we are working on getting Calypso spruced up: new sails, roller fuller, paint job and some fiberglas touch up of the rub rail flange. Calypso is a 1964 Pearson Ensign daysailer, designed by Carl Alberg, 23 ft in length, 3 ft draft and 3,000 lbs. Calypso is number 627 of the 2000 or so made.

Floorboard Repair

The floorboards in our Ensign were worn and tired.  After 60 years stainless steel screws were corroded and not holding. Rust popped up some of the teak plugs, also called “bungs”. Mostly, the wood was in decent condition with only a few cracked slats and limited dry rot. 

 

As part of a refit and facelift for this classic day sailer, we decided to take on the repair of the floorboards, rather than rebuilding a new cockpit floor.

 

With teak purchased at Andersens Lumber Yard in St. Petersburg to replace some floor boards, teak dowels from Midwest Dowels, bronze screws purchased on Amazon, and a selection of screw removal tools, Marvin started on the repair. Nearly 100 of the existing attachments needed to be addressed. After some trial and error testing we found the most efficient method was to use wood pegs to reattach the floorboards to the stringer supports.

 

 

We have not had good luck with this kind of extractor on no.8 screws

Popular screw removal tools were frustratingly ineffective to remove screws. While some of the screw heads showed shiny stainless, the teeth of the screws were solid rust. We found screw removal bits at Woodcraft Supply to be our solution.

 

This  3/8” screw removal bit was successful in drilling out compromised screws. It's like a precision hole saw. The drill hole left was perfect for using a 3/8” teak dowel to peg the pieces together. 

Screw is lodged in 3/8" bit

Note that bits are brittle and fail! - I could get from 1 to up to 20 screws removed per bit.
We used 11 bits for about 100 extractions.

After the screw is removed, a 3/8” high speed bit was used to drill through the slat and support, leaving a clean hole for a peg.

 

A small brush was used to clean out debris from the peg hole and add a little water to help the catalyze Gorilla glue bond.

Pegs were cut from 3/8” teak dowels to fit the depth of the peg hole, adding about an 1/8” to ¼” to the length. Teak pegs were soaked in water a few minutes and towel dried.

 

Gorilla glue was applied to the bottom and mid-section of each peg before placing in the hole. Pegs were tapped into position, being careful to leave a little of the peg exposed so it could be sanded flush with the floorboard slat.

 

Using a belt sander with 80 grit, the floorboard was sanded to fresh grain. An orbital sander was used to detail boards with finer grits to get a smooth raw finish.

 

The floor was washed with water and all sanding dust removed. After drying, the floor was wiped with acetone prior to applying an ipe wood sealer. Teak oil might be an option, but we had ipe oil left over from a cumaru deck project.

We would have preferred to have an epoxy filler that would have matched the color of the teak but used white epoxy to patch some larger voids.

 

A few attachments were made with a bronze screw, drilled with a countersink bit and plugged with a teak bung. Cracked slats were replaced with new 9/16" x 2" teak boards, cut to length.

 

The refurbished deck is solid and looks much better than the grayed teak finish. 

Next, working on the mast and rigging, and a paint job by Shields Marina in St. Marks. Looking forward to having Calypso all spruced up!

Thanks for reading - hope this might be useful to the owners in the Ensign Association.

12.02.2021