The Com-Pac 16 is manufactured in two halves,
the hull and deck, which are joined together at the rubrail with pop rivets and
some sort of polyester adhesive. As is common on most 20 + year old
Com-Pac 16s, the hull to deck joint on our 16 had begun to leak. The
problem is common mainly because the flex in the hull and deck over twenty or
so years eventually opens small fissures in the joint sealant. This is
especially common where the shroud chain plates pass through the joint.
To remedy the problem, I first removed the rubrail by removing the end caps and drilling out the rivets that held it in place. Once the rubrails were off, I also removed the layer of white duct tape that had been installed over the original joint (I have no idea what the tape does, but guess that it was used to cover the wet sealant so that the rails could be installed immediately after joining the hull and deck and prevent gluing the rubrail to the boat.) I then cleaned the dirt off the joint with a damp cloth before looking for fissures in the joint.
Although there were fewer places where the
joint had opened up than I expected, I did find a few trouble spots. I
ground out the faulty sealant with a dremel tool, blew out the debris with an
air wash and then wiped the entire joint down with MEK in preparation for
resealing the joint. On the advice of others, I chose to reseal the joint
with fast cure 3M 5200. I first went around the boat and filled all of
the fissures I had opened up with a dremel tool, then ran a bead of 5200 over
the entire joint and smoothed it out with a tongue depressor. I also
resealed the joint inside the cabin, and ran a bead of 5200 around the scupper
tubes where they passed into the cockpit and through the transom for good
measure. Those of you anticipating this job should know that one tube of
5200 is plenty to complete the job sufficiently.
If this repair sounds easy -- it was. The tough part, believe it or not, was installing new rubrails. The original rubrails on my 16 were a reddish-brown color. While the color was OK, they had weathered very poorly over the years - large black blotches had appeared on the topside of the rails where years of water and UV had deteriorated the outside colored layer and exposed the black rubber beneath. Although you can reuse the existing rubrails when you reseal the hull/deck joint, I decided to replace mine when I found another com-pac owner who had purchased new rails when he resealed his own hull/deck joint and then realize he could simply reinstall his old ones. He agreed to sell them to me at a fair (and reduced) price.
Please read this carefully: installing new rubrails is neither an easy nor a single-person job!! Consider yourself forewarned. I ran into three problems. First, the new rails were wider than the old rails, meaning that when installed over the hull/deck joint they
didn't fit properly, This was a minor
concern until, second, I tried to replace the brass caps at the bow and stern
transom corners. Since the new rubrails were thicker and wider than the
old, it was virtually impossible to get the caps on tight enough to match the
bolt holes through the hull/deck joint. In a panic, I called
Hutchins. Someone there told me to "push really hard" on the
cap to compress the rubber rail and line up the holes. No dice. I'm
no marine engineer, but it didn't take an engineering degree to see that the
cap wasn't going to fit over the new rails. I putzed with several
solutions, and in the end chose to carefully trim away some of the rubrail
material under the cap to make the bolt holes line up. This sounds easier
than it was ... while trimming the rails took a simple flick of a blade, it
took two people to pushing on the cap to compress the rubrail enough to roughly
line up the bolt holes. After installing the bow cap, I stretched the
rails to the stern and bolted them into place (two bolts hold the rails in place
- one under the cap and one through the cap). When I found that I
couldn't make the holes in the stern caps line up no matter how hard we pushed
on them (or how much I trimmed the rails), I opted to open the underside hole
into a slot, and use a small washer under the nut.The third problem I encountered had to do with our mild and wet summer - it was either too cold or too wet to warm up the rubrails enough to stretch them properly. The rubrails on a 16 are like a rubber band, they need to stretched into place, the tension holding them in place between the bow and stern. After I got the bow cap on, the boat sat on my drive way for about 2 1/2 weeks waiting for a hot enough day to stretch the rails to the right length - an unfortunate loss of sailing time during July!
In the end, I'm pleased with the job. The new, black rubrails are a dramatic improvement over the blotchy UV damaged and rust-red old rails. I also chose to polish 20 years of tarnish off the brass end caps; the polished brass caps really compliment the gold pin-striping on the boat! A couple of other tricks that we learned in this project or that you might consider if you anticipate this repair include:
1) Use new bolts to hold the rail and cap in place. You'll notice when you uninstall the rail that Hutchins cut the bolt off under the nut when they originally installed the end caps. You'll want to use longer bolts (say 2" or so) and then cut them off after the nut is installed as well. The longer bolts allow you to open up the cap a bit as well as give you some leverage as you work to replace the cap. Cut them off with a hack saw (carefully!) or a dremel tool.
2) You might consider building new brass end caps. Most home improvement stores sell brass "kick plates" for the lower areas of interior doors. These would be the perfect material to fabricate new caps with the right dimensions to fit over larger rubrail. You could even flatten out the old cap and use it as a template for the new one.
3) You might also consider filling the original bolt holes through the hull/deck joint with 5200 (or better yet, epoxy resin) and redrilling new holes when you reinstall the caps. You'll have to be careful on this one. Unless trimmed, the wider rubrails didn't allow the bolts that passed through the cap to pass through the hull/deck joint. While the cap is mostly cosmetic (i.e. a way to hide the trimmed ends of the rail), we still felt it was important that the rail be held in place with two bolts through the hull/deck joint on each end - especially given how much we had to stretch the rails into place.
