E26 Rebuild

[paul]

Hope the attachments come along. Here are pictures of my E26 revival. This had been somebody else's work in progress. The selling point to me was the stripped
interior; someone had ripped out liner and sanded most of interior f/g, then lost interest (pic 7877). Don't think this boat has much water time as it came with
original Kenyon instruments. There were wet spots in hull near keel which were repaired. I think this may be due to interior filling with water and seeping in thru the
screw holes that secured original floor.

Picture 2 (3283) shows interior with primer coat. I used one coat of Blue Water primer before covering with 1-part polyurethane. In this picture you can see a couple of the gussets added for deck support. There are 3 each side, support the deck and go about 1 ft down hull side. They are located near each deck stanchion. In hindsight I should have dropped the y-axis down to berths as a measure against oil-canning, but was concerned about deck support. Also put in 1/4 bulkheads under berths (4 places) so hull should be a bit stiffer. Not shown are 3 stringers across keel - pic file was too big to upload.

Note in pic 2 support under car tracks. I removed all the original barrel nuts (chrome-plated brass - some of which were badly corroded), put a longer flat-head screw thru the track, and used a 2" wide x 1/4" plywood strip to increase load distribution of the track. Strip was epoxy-coated, new bolts secured with fender washers and acorn nuts so no exposed threads to grab on sails/spinnaker.

Barrel nuts removed/replaced on all deck hardware as well (cleats, winches, etc). A new floor from 3/8" Okumi ply was laid, sitting flat on the keel stringers and also attched into some mounting blocks that were tabbed in. Lose a little headroom but still much more than my Merit 25.

Pic 3 (7994) is on mooring. To me it was sitting high in water but others have said this is normal. Power at moment in ancient 6HP (circa 1978) Johnson but enough
to power. It's a longshaft but with offset motor mount it does have bad moments when motoring in chop/waves on opposite tack. Old cabin windows replaced with 1/4" Lexan. Still getting by with an original main (not too bad shape, has shelf), but have used J24 jib and genny on headsail as this boat came with original Hood foil system, which had several cracks. Was not sure whether to go Tuff-Luff or roller at time of launch, forgot about sails. Still, performance has been great in low-key club events. I had thought initially about a good PHRF campaign but interest in that fell off with time constraints.
Paint looks OK but as mentioned in another post the hull coat looks bad up close. Bottom still needs to be stripped, we did smooth out a bit and used a black ablative (to match original). I prefer light blue to see scum when it builds, makes cleaning easier.

Trailer (not shown) is a single-axle homemade from a 24 ft trailer home. It's what came with boat, but does have 7000# axle and tires are LT with 3000# load range ea. I did tow 100 mi to bring home, then a few 30 mi stints to bring to my house so I can work. It's OK, but would rather have tandem axle for anything over 3000#.

For racing, the plan was to use the E26 frac rig as built and run masthead spinnaker. If I used the stock pole and put the spin block up 54", I'd take a 6 sec hit. This did not seem that bad as I could increase spinnaker luff accordingly. Many races here are win-lee 2 laps with 1 to 1.5 mi legs so DW advantage looked good. Maybe another yr?

This yr will be rudder rebuild. We did a temp fix to get things going but there are surface cracks reforming on upper stem. I know the section above water is severely rotted inside. If anyone has a detail on repair would be glad to hear about it. New foil about $2K, don't want to go there (yet).

[nimbus]

Looking good! We were lucky that the interior was already re-done on our boat. Here's what our painted interior looks like if you are needing inspiration. It's our hull that needs repainting as you can see in this picture.