Stainless fabricators?

[Bill NH]

Anyone have a recommendation for a good stainless fabricator?  I'm considering having a new stemhead fitting made up and would like to explore the feasability and cost of having a double anchor roller incorporated into it...

Someone in the Northeast that I could meet with would be preferred, but I can supply proper drawings, photos of a similar fitting on a sistership, and the original part coming off the boat to a competent fabricator most anywhere in the lower 48...

[Fortis]

I think I might be a little far away, but if you have some questions and such, feel free to ask me.

[Bill NH]

Here's a photo of the type of fitting I'm looking into...  any thoughts?  This one was fabricated by a gentleman in England but shipping from over there is pretty pricey and the dollar isn't doing too well now either...

[Fortis]

Umm, yeah, I do have a few thoughts based on those pics.

Firstly, The slight outward angle on the two rollers looks great, but unless you are ALWAYS going to use two anchors, it means that anytime you use just one, the rope will be pulling at an angle and increasing chafe slightly. When I build these I build them in parallel, ont he grounds that 80% + of the itme you will only be using one anchor.

Two, I do not know if the baseplate is that size to fit existing holes and backing plates in your model of boat, but it seems a little too small to me in terms of how far back it reaches. If you think about the loading direction on this thing, going back just an inch further will have significant lever-arm advantage and add close to 20% holding strength...but what it will mostly add is reduced pulling on your deck surface...So I would have the plate extend back beyond where the sidewalls of the roller start. My "Ideal" build would have the baseplate thin down from six to three mm at the back and then continue to become the deck plate beneath the actual mooring cleats/samson posts/anchor bollards on the deck. Tying it all together that way adds massive amounts of strength for very little weight. Because I build mine in parallel, there is also room for  a central bolthole, which keeps the entire area as a compressed sandwitch instead of allowing a little flex between the centre of the deck and the plate when under loading by waves coming and going.

Third. Pickling. There has not been proper pickling of the pictured plate. The area between the two rollers and along edges of welds along the outside are still discoloured and heat effected, but the peice in general has been poilished and buffed. This is rather strange, to say the least. After welding heat has been applied to stainless steel, A pickling paste or dip must be used (and used correctly) in order to re-surface the steel and allow it to resume its corrossion resisting charcateristics. Failure to do this means your stainless rusts just as happily as mild steel would.

Fourth. Welding choice. This peice was welded together using a MIG welder ona single pass...This is a poor choice for strength and longevity, but excellent for economics, as it is the very quickest and cheapest way of joining stainless. I would not use oit on 6mm plate as shown above. Either TIG or MAW (Arc) would provide a better and more reliable weld in this application (I build these so that if a giant came along and decided to just lift your boat out of the water by its anchour line and twirl and bounce it a few time...the fitting would survive. Because when you are off the boat, whatever other safety or backup systems you have, if the deck hardware for your ground tackle fails, Game Over.
This particular picture os of something that fails that standard in my opinion. 6mm PLate should not be single pass each side welded, even with the higher strength and reliability methods of TIG or ARC (though really superior TIG work would probably get my nod. It would be by someone way better at it then I am, and I am pretty good, actually.) If I was doing this I would do it as a three stage fillet weld using ARC as a complete welding pass profile. I would also smooth the welds to reduce surface area and areas for crevice corrosion to begin, leaving the individual bumps triples the surface area and allows lots of little crevices for salt to bond into and begin attacking even stainless (remember this plate will spend a lot of its life in contact with an anchor shank made of a dis-similar metal while being splashed by salt water and dried in air pretty much more then any other single area of the boat). Once again, this approach adds soem time and cost to the overall project, though not more weight. The difference is in strength and durability.

The thing to understand is that most bowrollers available off the shelf onthe market are at best of a "lunch hook" or recreational fishing quality. If a fabricator shows most people something that is just a little chunkier then those, made of thicker plates, their response tends to be "OOoh, extreme heavy duty cruising gear!"...Where that may not be the case at all...Especially if the strength of the unti through its welds is still not much better then the thinner plated commercial unit. People just aren't critical enough of what they are seeing, as long as it seems an improvement over what they have seen up till that point.

Final point. I do not like the weld ends. Welds crack and die (and come undone like zippers) form the ends, where stress has the most lever action and vibration damage to intoroduce. The welds in this picture are just zip-along welds that do not have any added care or back-pooling at the ends (backpooling is hard to do with MIG, so many jobbing shops just don't bother,because adding ten seconds to every weld adds up to less work getting done....also, a less then deft hand makes back pooling look really rough and than you need to spend five more minutes cleaning it up.)

Anyway....You did ask for an appraisal. be careful what you ask for.
I appologise in advance for what is likely to be apalling typing, most of this was typed at 4.30am, one handed, while cradling my son back to sleep in my other arm...

his slumbers returned...I am now heading back to bed too.


'night.


Alex.

[Bill NH]

Great, thanks for the education Alex!  That was more of an appraisal than I had even hoped for...

To clear up a couple things regarding the design, the shape is designed to fit on the toerail of a Vega, which is solid and part of the deck mold, and is also thru-bolted to the inward flange of the hull mold.  A more solid anchor point than the deck surface.  The ones that have been installed so far actually sit about 3/4" above the crown of the deck.  The builder has recommended not going with a backing block to fill in the space so it can drain.  The cutout arc in the aft end of the plate is for a water fill fitting in the foredeck...

I plan to replace the stemhead fitting, so the idea of incorporating an anchor roller or two into a single piece seemed better than adding a single roller separately...  I'm wondering if this will turn into a project that costs a quarter of the value of the 27' boat its going on?!

Thanks much for the thoughts, grog for the detail you put into it!

Bill

[Fortis]

I don't know what 25% of the value of your boat is, but I would quote the equivalent of around $550-600US for one built to my above standards and delivered with a high-buff polish and backing plate as needed.

:)


Alex.

[Auspicious]

Alex,


What part of the country are you in? I'm in Annapolis, MD shopping for TIG training. Not to hijack the thread - I'd like an independent assessment of the alternatives.

sail fast, dave

[Bill NH]

Alex - went looking for your email address and saw you're in Melbourne, Australia?  I assumed you were in the states somewhere...

Is the old Alma Doepel still sailing out of Melbourne?  I was a guest instructor in her back in the late 80s in my sail training days...

Anyhow, its reassuring to see what you would charge for the job.  I envisioned quite a bit more, so once again thanks for the welding recommendations.  They'll be a big help when I go shopping around here!

[Fortis]

OH poop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I just posted this whole long answer regarding both the Alma Doepel and the welding courses thing and the system just ate it.

I am now just too annoyed to bother doing it all again.

Sorry.

(I was logged in, typed it all in and then hit send, the screen telling me I needed to log in came up and when I did the post I had written was gone. Bugger.)

May try again later. Work to do now.


Alex.

[Zen]

I hate when that happens  >:(

[CapnK]

Alex - Grog to you for a thorough, educating post! Good stuff in there! :)

For you and Zen - regarding the log in thing, which I have not experienced on this board but have elsewhere, some thoughts:

1) At the first log-in screen, there is a checkbox for something like "Always keep me logged in" - do you have that checked? (I do.)

2) When you get the "Have to log in to post" message, did/do you try hitting your "Back" button to see whether what you'd typed was still there?

3) If it takes me a long time to type in a post, I usually hit the "Preview" button a few times as I type. Maybe this helps keep me logged in?

4) Another thing I will do on a long post (here and elsewhere) is to, just before hitting Preview or Post, highlight all the text, and right click "Copy" it. That way it gets put onto the computer clipboard (or whatever its called), so if there is a problem I can just right click Paste it back into whatever form I am typing it into.

Hope some of those might help.

Again, Thanks for an enlightening post, Alex!

[Fortis]

Okay, short version of the answer that got eaten

The Alma Doepel ceased operating when they lost their survey and insurance in around '99. The Board that ran her had some internal meltdowns and ideas that seemed to involve losing all  their sponsors in order to better argue with each other. She spent a few years sitting around becomeing a hulk while the Board conducted civill war and eventually managed to pull their heads out of their collective fundaments (There is a certain kind of politics which only happens amongst high minded volunteer groups of dedicated amatuers...Poll Pot could have learnt a thing or two...).

Anyway, The ship was ina  pretty sad state and most of the local sponsors had been burnt, so they managed to organise a deal ad towed her to Port Macquarie in New South Wales. She is being maintained and somewhat restored as part of a boat building school project, and they are getting funding to get her recommissioned so she can be a sail training vessel as well as an adventure tour ship again. The rather ambitious plan is to have her be a sort of ferry between Port MacQurie and Melbourne, spending a few motnhs in each city running day tours and weekend adventures in between the two big trips up the coast, which would sell the premium adventure package.
I wish them the best of luck, but think that she is just too damned big and expensive to maintain to ever stand on her own financial feet without some heavy ongoing patronage/sponsorship.

In Port Philip at the moment we do have the entierprise, a much smaller tall ship that is just about able to keep itself going on its own reveniew.she's a very pretty old thing and a favourite platform for atending various races and other big ticket events around town. I am taking my son and my nephew for the full day sail down to the seal platforms in a couple of weeks.

Regarding the Welding Courses. It was a very long winded article I wrote...but the gist is do the course....but do a general welding course with both workshop/hands-on classes and theory (classroom time). All of the different types of welding feed and inform each other and knowing a basic or better grasp of all of them will make you a better and more proficient welder in any one of them.
A course will teach yo to understand and select what you are doing based on being able to asses what is needed and how to get the result form your tools...etting a "guy you know who welds" to teach you (the way many people do it) just emans you will have a monkey-see-monkey-do approach to welding that will limit you. Doing a course like this is almost always worth the money.


Alex.

here's hoping it works....