Hola.
Not being the handy man...please forgive my ignorance and excitement.
The rivets on my boom's forward main sheet block came out of the boom...I read around the internet and folks seem to favor gettng a larger diameter rivet instead of through bolting...well the hole was up to 1/4 size and my local lowe's did not have them. The helpful employee told me that the papa-mama hardware store close to my house always have all the "odd" things. I went over to them and they did not have that size but....they had a great "solution". The sold me this rubber cylinder with a nut inside close to the bottom...the trick is you drill the hole on the boom to acommodate this rubber cylinder (much like a rivet) and once the rubber cylinder is inside the boom, you use the machine type screw to set the pad eye on the boom...as you tighten the screw, the rubber starts bunching up (tech terms) inside the boom much like a rivet would!! You tighten it like a burly man would and that is that....the bunch up rubber creates a seal and acts like a rivet holding the pad eye in place...neat!!
I am going sailing tonight so the thing will be tested, I'll report later. For a good measure of safety, I ran a vectran <sp> line around the pad eye and block and boom to make sure that if the rubber rivets pop...the block won't. If this turns out to be a real fix...I'll let you guys know.
be well
Antolin
full rig 155456
Not being the handy man...please forgive my ignorance and excitement.
The rivets on my boom's forward main sheet block came out of the boom...I read around the internet and folks seem to favor gettng a larger diameter rivet instead of through bolting...well the hole was up to 1/4 size and my local lowe's did not have them. The helpful employee told me that the papa-mama hardware store close to my house always have all the "odd" things. I went over to them and they did not have that size but....they had a great "solution". The sold me this rubber cylinder with a nut inside close to the bottom...the trick is you drill the hole on the boom to acommodate this rubber cylinder (much like a rivet) and once the rubber cylinder is inside the boom, you use the machine type screw to set the pad eye on the boom...as you tighten the screw, the rubber starts bunching up (tech terms) inside the boom much like a rivet would!! You tighten it like a burly man would and that is that....the bunch up rubber creates a seal and acts like a rivet holding the pad eye in place...neat!!
I am going sailing tonight so the thing will be tested, I'll report later. For a good measure of safety, I ran a vectran <sp> line around the pad eye and block and boom to make sure that if the rubber rivets pop...the block won't. If this turns out to be a real fix...I'll let you guys know.
be well
Antolin
full rig 155456