Progress

Last weekend we we finally had weather nice enough to go work on the boat again. A winter storm had shredded our tarp, and the boat had a foot of water in the bottom. We siphoned most of it out with a garden hose, and finished up with the shop vac. That took most of the day, so we put a new tarp over her and called it a day.

Yesterday we went back, and I turned my attention to that frozen bolt on the keel winch.

The nut came off ok, but the bolt passes through a plate that appears to be 1/4" thick aluminum. It's not actually threaded into the plate, but it is a tight fit and apparently the dissimilar metals corroded until it won't turn.

I started out by heating the joint with a torch, thinking as the metals expanded at different rates it might loosen up. A half-our of alternately heating the joint and then trying to loosen the bolt with an impact wrench yielded no results. I stopped when I hit my hand with the hammer, instead of the impact wrench.

After a break during which I put an ice pack on my bruised left hand, I attacked the top of the bolt with a cutting wheel mounted in my Dremel tool. The first cut was in the existing screw slot, and then I made a second perpendicular cut. Once both cuts went down into the body of the bolt, Angela and I took turns chiseling at it. We managed to finally break the head off and free the winch.

We then removed all the rest of the hardware from the deck, except for two pieces. There are two more bolts that are frozen solid, and we had used up all our cutting wheels. I'll pick up another pack of cutting wheels this week and we'll get those last two bolts next time we go out.