Back in March we had an 80 mph straight line wind storm that took out a pair of trees close to the house. One hit the corner of the sunroom and the other took out my son’s play set and a zip line I’d built. So most of March and part of April were filled with rafter repairs, 2′ x 32′ of shingling, hunting down a leak that ended up just being rain blown under the unfinished soffit, cutting down and removing trees, and rebuilding the play set and zip line. Could have been a lot worse though! A house down the street had a couple huge oak trees fall on it.

After finishing house repairs and yard beautification for a visit from the in-laws I decided to work on the boomkin tube. I changed this from the designed plywood box to a 3″ PVC pipe for lack of maintenance inside and increased space in the aft compartment. After hole sawing and die grinding the holes I screwed on some 2×4 V blocks to hold the tube centered. I glued the tube in place with GFlex thickened with 404 after sanding to 80 grit, alcohol wiping, and flame treating. It’s pretty impressive how well the epoxy bonds to the PVC compared to a test piece with factory finish.

After the epoxy I packed into the holes cured I put a big fillet around the tube and cut and sanded the ends off flush. My plan is to epoxy a collar onto the boomkin so it will mate up to the angle of the transom which will keep it from sliding forward. Then a pin or some other mechanism in the cockpit area will keep it from slidding backwards. I’m thinking the boomkin will be hollow and the mizzen sheet will come through to a cam cleat mounted right onto the heel of the spar.

Next I dry fit a pair of hatches for the aft compartment. The plans only call for one, but by making the boomkin a PVC pipe I have enough room for one on the port side. The fasteners are just tapped #10-24 into 1/2″ holes of 404. Should work fine, but if not it’ll be easy to drill them out for through bolts.

Moving forward I drilled some holes to be filled with 404 for the hatches in the dodger.