KEEL ME NOW... start bolting the keel on...

We made the keel bolts from 1018 steel and plated them. I used steel because that is what was there and I didn't want to try stainless steel because i read bad thing about using SS under water.

 We gooped the keel with 3M 5200 and painted the bottom of the wood. I feel sorry for the next guy trying to take off the keel down the road...

We snugged up the bolts for the next 3 days until the goop stop coming out...

All the floors were seals and painted and we made 1/4" x 2" steel straps for the top of the keel floors to spread the load...

All snug up...

Looking at the bottom paint was real bad. there was big spots where the paint just fell off. So now we take off all the paint... should be easy? Not... the best was Jasco paint re-mover. we had about 5 to 6 layers to come off where the paint didn't fall off...it was hard work. the boys bitch the whole time...

Once all the paint was off we sanded then sealed with Creps epoxy sealer and all the planks looked good no rot...

the longer the Tulla sat out of the water the more thing started to open up... Keep moving!

moving on to the inside. Scrape the wood, clean the wood, paint the wood with Bilge-cote.

It turned out looking good!

Next thing on the list was to re-place some of the copper rivets. When i sailed Tulla the first time i saw water leaking from some of the planks.

Some of the rivets the roves were gone and that is where it leaked.

We pop out sone of the rivets and a 1/3 was gone... so we only re-placed as needed.

We are working on the keel to get all the old paint off down to bare metal.

Now we metal preped and eopxy painted all ready to install back on Tulla.

When we pulled the old bolts out it had duck-seal over the bolts, then a wood plug... we will do the same when we re-install.

The keel bolts were re-placed at some time ago because there were nuts at the bottom not forged.

Out of 7 keel bolts 2 were gone and the others were 1/2 gone... good thing we decided to re-place them, the keel was ready to fall off if it was sailed hard...

As the guys are working with the keel and floors i started to look at a leak that was at the stem. it was all gooped up from the last guy...

It looked like there was a broom handle in there! pulled it out, cleaned, cut out the rot...

New oak set in epoxy...

we got the keel to drop about 3/4" so we could use a saws-all to cut all the keel bolts and then roll the trailer out from under the boat...

The keel bolts did come of the cast iron keel real easy, the next thing we had to do was to fix some of the floors. one trun shit because of the 8 lb hammer pounding... and the others we took out to make the lower half from new oak.

 this one had half of the keel bold stuck in the lower half...then make a new one.

To get the keel bolts out of the floors we had to use a hydraulic jack to push the keel bolts back up. then we made a hydraulic puller to pull the keel bolts out of the floors...