By adopting the industrial look of aluminum for his companionway, Robb avoided the high price of teak.
Full metal jacket replaces aged-out on-deck woodwork
Issue 123: Nov/Dec 2018
My Cal 9.2, Jade, was in a distressed state when I bought her. She’d experienced a chainplate failure and had a large number of other issues, most of them minor and many of them, such as the sorry state of the exterior woodwork, aesthetic in nature. We first tackled the major issues and got ourselves out sailing, leaving the exterior woodwork and other cosmetic items for another day.
That day came when the wooden tiller broke off in my hand in the middle of a race, and I realized I could not put off addressing all the exterior woodwork! We dropped the sails, strapped on the emergency tiller, and limped home.
Once at the dock, I looked at the remains of the tiller and the poor condition of the companionway trim boards, dropboards, and even the slider. The teak was rotten in places and all of it needed to be replaced.
The next morning, I was at the local wood mill with high hopes and a notepad full of measurements, but the prohibitively high cost of teak came as a shock. Much as I love the beauty of woodwork on a boat, I know that wood is time-consuming to maintain, and that working with teak would be hard on my saw blades. Besides, there are ethical concerns about using a rare species like teak. Now I knew its cost, I could talk myself away from replacing the rotten teak with teak. I needed an alternative.
I keep my boat in the very industrial little town of Windsor, Ontario, where metal fabricators abound. I called my friend and sailing buddy Jeremy Gheller of Gheller Metalworks Ltd. He could fabricate everything in either stainless steel or aluminum. I chose aluminum as it’s lighter, less expensive, and easy to maintain. We pulled the old teak off the boat to use as templates.
Starting with the companionway, Jeremy and his crew cut and shaped trim from 1⁄8-inch aluminum stock. Like the teak trim it replaced, this trim would define the channel into which the dropboards slide — but I no longer wanted multiple dropboards. Instead, I glued together the beat-up wooden boards to use as a template for a single aluminum board. To stiffen the metal board, and make it a better fit in the channels, Jeremy folded over the edges of the material in a metal-bending brake and spot-welded them at the corners.
The folded-back edges stiffen the dropboard, at left, and are thick enough to be a secure fit in its channels, at right. The slide is 1⁄8-inch-thick aluminum.
The single board stows nicely behind the head against the main bulkhead and promises maintenance-free durability to withstand the rigors of life aboard a racing sailboat for years to come.
The hatch slide is simply a sheet of 1⁄8-inch-thick aluminum cut to size.
That left the rotten tiller as the only remaining piece of exterior woodwork on the boat. A replacement custom-made in wood would be expensive, so I decided, “Why not go all-in with the industrial look and make the tiller out of aluminum tubing?”
The aluminum tiller does not look out of place on a boat that had minimal wood trim — and has even less now.
I purchased a length of 1⁄8-inch-wall aluminum tube from the metal shop’s offcut shelf and one of the workers capped and knurled the end to give me a zero-maintenance tiller that fits my hand nicely and looks right at home.
I’m pleased with the clean and modern look of the aluminum, and that instead of oiling and varnishing teak, I simply break out aluminum polish once a season. Perhaps the icing on the cake is that the total cost — admittedly with a “friendship discount” — was a fraction of what I would have paid for a custom wooden tiller and teak for the companionway.
Robb Lovell grew up sailing on Lake Huron aboard his family’s Endeavor 40, where he caught the sailing bug. That was about 20 boats ago. Rob enjoys buying and restoring boats and is an avid racer and cruiser based out of LaSalle Mariner’s Yacht Club (LMYC) in Ontario. He currently races on a Cal 9.2 named Jade, but owns three other sailboats and a tugboat . . . yes, he has a problem!
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