For something that is supposed to be watertight, there are a lot of holes in Mahdee's hull. The holes for bolting on the tailfeather were a special challenge...

Not only were they big (3/4 inch diameter and 3 to 4 feet long), but they also had fairly tight tolerances for their exits (center of keel at the bottom and between floors on top). For this reason, we pounded out the old bolts. That left the holes in the keel. All we had to do was position the tailfeather and drill up through the existing holes into and through the new tailfeather. Easier said than done. When Mahdee was put into the shed, we were concerned about headroom on the deck. As it is, we have very little room up there. The keel, therefore, has very little room between it and the asphalt floor of the shed. There was some talk about being able to dig down into the asphalt to increase clearance, but only after Mahdee was in the shed, we were informed that there was a big sewer main just below the keel. Not something we wanted to dig into.

The bottom line is that we had about 13 inches of room for the drill bit and drill. Then we had to drill up about 4 feet (most of that through an existing hole). Once we had the tailfeather in place, we didn't want move it because not only is the 800 lb beast heavy, but getting it realigned would be difficult. Most of our auger bits are 18 inches long and some of the boatyard augers are longer so we wouldn't be able to put in or remove the bits from the bottom of the keel. We toyed with the idea of putting one auger bit into each of the 6 holes and we almost had enough bits. But then one of us (no names here) broke two of our 3/4 inch bits on a different part of the boat -- but that's another story...

A related problem is that most of the augers have 7/16 inch hex shafts. Extensions with that size shaft are readily available, but are too big to fit in holes smaller than 1 inch. We had ground down the extensions so that they would fit into 7/8 inch holes, but taking off enough to fit into a 3/4 inch hole left very little thread for the set screw. With a lot of chips in the hole, it is often necessary to pull pretty hard on the bit to back it out and having the bit follow the extension depends entirely on that set screw. Further, the set screw socket fills with wood pulp making it very time consuming to connect and disconnect the extensions (you have to dig out all the packed in wood pulp before the allen key will work).

Then Brenda discovered that Irwin has some new Speedbor (Max) bits that are like little augers (spade bits won't stay centered in the existing hole, and therefore the tailfeather may not stay aligned). The Speedbor bits support a quick release extension system that has a maximum diameter of 5/8 inch. So the bit will feed into a 3/4 inch hole and even have a little room for the smallest chips to drop past the extensions (the voice of hope speaking here). The 1/4 inch format of the shafts were wimpy for this task, but we decided to give it a try. It wasn't easy to find a place with both the bits and the extensions, but the internet is a wonderful place and Brenda can find anything using it.

It was tight working under the boat with 12 inch extensions. It was also slow going, because I could only go about 1/2 inch into the the new purple heart tailfeather before I had to back all the way out to clear the chips. The quick release system was certainly faster than working with the set screws in the 7/16 inch extensions, but it was by no means quick. I had up to three 12 inch extension on the bit, as well as sometimes the 6 inch extension. Another boat yard client likened it to drilling for oil -- adding extensions one after the other on the way in, and removing them one after the other on the way out (with lots of drill direction reversals to keep the bits from jamming in the chips and lots of compressed air to blow out chips once the bits were out). Sometimes the bits jammed and sometimes they disconnected in the hole. The latter was the worse problem. In all but one case, I was able to get reconnected and could remove the bit normally. The one time I couldn't get reconnected, I was lucky in that the tip of the bit had poked through the top of the tailfeather. I was able to drill down from above to open the hole, and then use drifts to pound the lost extensions up through the top. At other times, one extension twisted in half, and another burst into a handful of pieces (at least one of which was never recovered). In the end, the process was successful. Six holes for bolting the tailfeather to the keel and pulling the deadwood tightly together.

Brenda sometimes accuses me of being destructive. I don't know why she thinks that and judging by the extra bit parts I am sure I broke less than she expected. Anyway, without tapping into the reserves, the remaining drill and extension pieces were even useful for drilling the 5/8 inch tailfeather bolts connecting the stern post. Those holes were especially tough because they bend slightly around the propeller shaft and don't poke out the side or into the rabbet. I have no idea how they originally drilled those holes. But those bolts were far longer than any 5/8 inch drill bit we had and no other extension except the Speedbor could possibly have gone through the hole.

In addition to the 8 bolts for the tailfeather we installed today, we also bored and drifted the rudder post and used the Speedbor system to drill up through the keel into floor 36. That floor sits just forward of the tailfeather and the bolts help hold on the new worm-shoe. With the 12 new fasteners in the stern, Mahdee once again has a tight a.... errr... what I should say is that the back end of Mahdee is once again getting really solid.

David