Mast step wear: is this a problem?

bhm

Active Member
I finally got around to looking inside the mast step of my recently-acquired 1973 Minifish, and noticed that the inside of the mast step is gouged or worn away on both sides near the top. Is this something I should be worried about, and try to fix somehow? I've never done anything with fiberglass, and have no real desire to start now. Most of the inner surface is smooth, like the outer hull, but in these two places it is bumpy. Here are some pictures:
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The last picture also shows a recessed ring between the hull and the mast step, going all the way around, showing that same bumpy under-layer. In contrast I saw the following picture on Facebook of a 2006 Sunfish with a split in the mast step and I see that everything is smooth, and the mast step shades smoothly into the hull, without this recessed ring, or anything else revealing that bumpy under-layer.

FB pic of 2006 boat.jpg


So is this a problem? I don't want to end up like this picture, also from Facebook, showing catastrophic failure of a Laser mast-step:

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If that's the extent of the "damage", nothing really needs to be done. That's not an uncommon defect.

Otherwise, buy a $22 cartridge of thckened epoxy (THIXO, 6-10, Flexpoxy) mix it, spread the mix over the rough spots, cover and smooth the finish using a moderately heavy plastic film. (Epoxy won't stick to most plastics). The above cartridges have a long shelf-life. You can expect frequent use for subsequent repairs to Sunfish or home repairs.

More mast step information, using "search":

 
If that's the extent of the "damage", nothing really needs to be done. That's not an uncommon defect.

Otherwise, buy a $22 cartridge of thckened epoxy (THIXO, 6-10, Flexpoxy) mix it, spread the mix over the rough spots, cover and smooth the finish using a moderately heavy plastic film. (Epoxy won't stick to most plastics). The above cartridges have a long shelf-life. You can expect frequent use for subsequent repairs to Sunfish or home repairs.

Thanks. If I do this repair to the two irregular gouges, should I also fill in that recessed ring that goes all the way around? The ring is so regular that it looks as if it might have come that way from the factory, but I would imagine that filling it in could only help not hurt.
 
That "recessed ring" is designed so the mast has less to rest on and less friction when it rotates. You should leave it as it is. Once you fix the top of the step as Land VW recommends, you can then fill the step with water. If it drains, then the bottom of the step needs attention. If it stays full you are fine.
 
Now that it had pontoons mounted on it it’ll be a lot harder to tip on it’s side and drain! Maybe it is time for bhm to install a port.
Actually, the Sailboats-to-go outriggers come right off: they slide into the crossbar and are held in place by spring buttons. So only the crossbar is bolted to the boat, so it's easy to turn on its side to dump out any water that might have gotten into the cockpit or mast step, before rolling the boat back to the car on the wheels that plug into the same crossbar.
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Here's what it currently looks like in my garage, showing how little the bar sticks out. The vertical tube is the non-rotating STG mast step, which I put on just to use as an instrument post for my GPS speedometer for my one test sail, so it wouldn't move from side to side as the Sunfish mast rotates. The black thing is the lower half of the taller Force 5 mast I just bought from Alan Glos.

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Turning the boat on its side to dump water before loading it into the car is automatic for me because my 40-year old aluminum canoe leaks along the seam at the keel, so I usually have a couple of quarts of water to dump out, if I haven't been sponging it out during the sail. I was going to try sealing it this winter with the butyl sealing product I've read about on line, but now that I have the Minifish to sail instead I may not bother.
 
Bhm how much does your minifish weigh? Have you opened the drain to see if you have water?
I haven't tried to weigh it, and I'm not sure how I would do that. It feels like exactly its nominal listed weight of 75 pounds when I load it into my car, same as my fiberglass 8-foot Nelson dinghy. If it was much more than that, I'm sure I would have noticed.

I know that Sunfish are prone to something called "waterlogging", and I did ask the seller about that. He said that when Sunfish get water inside you can hear it sloshing around, and he was very sure that this boat had never had water in it during the time he had owned it.

Nothing on this boat looks like a drain plug, as I know that from my kayak. There's a drain-like fitting at the bottom of the cockpit which I thought was part of something called a "self-bailer" that I've heard about, and I thought was supposed to somehow carry water from the cockpit and out through the visible outlet on the bottom of the hull, through an internal valve of some kind. I have not tried to test or adjust this in any way. On my one test sail, I did not ship any significant amount of water into the cockpit, so I don't know how or whether it is currently working. I asked the seller about it, and he thought that maybe it only drains water while the boat is heeling. Anyway I don't much care, since I'm used to bailing or sponging water out of my leaky canoe anyway, so I wouldn't mind similarly sponging out the Minifish cockpit occasionally during a sail, if that turns out to be necessary.
 
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Minifish (and pretty much every modern sailboat) have a drain to drain any water that gets in the hull (as opposed to the cockpit.) For future reference, I have circled the location of the drain on the Minifish. It looks like one your wood mounting blocks may be directly over the drain. If a Sunfish or Mini has had water in it a long time, it tends to soak into the foam flotation, so you wouldn't hear is sloshing around. I am glad to hear your boat feels light.
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Ah, I hadn't realized that was a drain plug. Since it looked just like a bolt head (as opposed to the much bigger hand-tightened drain plug on the stern of my kayak), I had figured that maybe something was attached to it underneath, like maybe whatever the self-bailing mechanism is. I can get to it to open it if need be, but is there any need for that if the boat feels light and I don't currently hear water inside it?
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I can get to it to open it if need be, but is there any need for that if the boat feels light and I don't currently hear water inside it?
People typically do it to verify they don't have a problem. Hopefully opening it is not hard, altho on older boats like that they sometimes become frozen and it's a bigger project than the usual unscrew-it-with-a-screwdriver method.
 

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