The Ballad Exchange

Finally got the boat home. Thanks to a very skilled crane operator she now sits comfortably in my front yard. A very beautiful although huge garden gnome





I spent all day cleaning the hull and emptying out the cabin and lockers.





Next step is to start removing plywood in order to clean the inside of the hull.

Yay! Glad you got it over the hedge safely. They look like small boats on the ocean, but rather large next to a house. Obelix won't be easy to ignore!

You have the foreward-facing nav station, I see. And your bilge covers/table leg sockets are interesting because they are off center; our floorboards are smaller and the table sockets are on their centerlines. Seem like Albin made several changes in the V-berth design, too: we don't have that full-height bulkhead to port. Typical water damage around the aft chainplates. Our actual thru-deck bolts were likely the 1972 originals & were a sort of metal donut welded to a SS carriage bolt. When we pulled them, a few had what looks like stress cracks, but on the long axis (not what you would expect, at all):



Rationalizing those load paths will be the big challenge, with the pilot berths totally going away. It seems like either owners or Albin themselves made many changes in the design of the aft lower chainplates, whether because they leaked or because they damaged the plywood, not sure. Current plan is entirely new partial bulkheads/knees, glassed in all the way around, to carry the loads. Here's how they did it with pilot berths:



When you start tracing loads, you realize (because of the offset) the only thing positively tying the aft shroud to the hull proper is two short, brass screws thru 10mm plywood!



Oh, so many fun discoveries.

Today I've gotten three comments from passersby. All positive Apparently Ballads are really good looking boats - who knew

That does seem like a strange kind of stress fracture. I Will be sure to take a close look at my thru-deck bolts (and post pictures).

I just browsed thru the pictures on your flicker profile. How is the hatch installation coming along? What size hatch are you planning to install?

I would love to see more pictures of the inside of your Ballad

Our interior is still in the gutting process, more depressing than encouraging. Have you done any moisture testing on your decks? When we opened up the side decks, we found the areas around the chainplates wet (mostly because they filled the penetration areas with putty -- then missed the putty when they drilled the chainplates) :



The genoa tracks had internal backing, too. Unfortunately, it was 3/4" rift sawn fir, which was so rotted I pulled the board out with my fingers. It does not help the fir was straight while the track is curved!



We need to figure out what to replace it with. We have phenolic material that size, but the upwards loads are maybe not great enough to justify the weight? I will be playing with high-density urethane foams soon & may make my own core material from it. It will need backing washers as well.



Here's a photo from the shop, showing the new hatch and mast collar rebuild. They need final fairing & temporary painting. The hatch is only 50x50cm (40x40 cutout); we wanted to go a little bigger, 60x60cm, but this one came cheap on eBay, we didn't want to interfere with boom or vang, and we are planning to lead halyards to the cockpit -- not much room on the Ballad's coachroof! We also added two opening ports in the cockpit bulkhead:



The goal this year, scaled down from the original ambitious plan, is to stop the leaks; open up the wet areas; and get the whole boat dried out. Thru hulls are almost patched, ice box is sorted (and the galley with it, mostly), and we may get some bulkheads replaced before winter. It probably horrifies most Ballad owners, but we decided early on the head is not workable for us as-is. So we will probably be combining the nav station and an aft head, which will supply some headroom at least.



There may be some sacrifice of privacy, but anyone looking for privacy on an Albin Ballad has chosen the wrong boat.

Most of the plywood has been removed from the boat



I've had a close look at the bulkheads and it turns out they are in very good condition. The outer veneer is worn thru in many places but there are no signs of rot or any other damage. I'm considering simply painting the old bulkheads (in a nice white).

More pictures on syobelix.blogspot.dk

I was hoping to paint the inside of the hull before winter sets in. Looks like I'm in luck First coat of Hempel Multicoat has been applied. If it gets "too" white I have the option of using Hempel Brilliant Gloss in slightly "darker" white for the final coats. Hempel claims that Multicoat can be used as both a primer and a topcoat.

Looking good!
One thing you might check: Just ahead of the forward cabin window are three bolts on either side holding an angle bracket that attaches the upper part of the main bulkhead to the cabin sides. The cabin sides here (between the inner liner and the outer shell) have a block of wood inserted to reinforce the area where the holes are drilled and the bolts put through.
On my Ballad the block of wood had been misplaced too far forward and there was no material at the holes between the hull liner and the outer hull. (The holes for the bolts were just past the edge of the blocks.) This made it impossible to tighten the bolts properly. I confirmed the correct block location from the German Ballad website drawings ... Albin had goofed by 100mm
Give the area a tap with your finger to confirm correct positioning of the reinforcement block. My boat sailed for over 35 years with this fault with no apparent harm, and it was an easy repair, simply drilling a 40mm hole in the inner linner at each hole and epoxying in a 40mm diameter piece of hardwood. This gave the bolts a base to compress on.

Picture of plugs in holes:

Thanks for the heads-up, Peter. I hadn't checked those bolts yet, but you can see dimpling of the coach sides around them, so they probably missed the blocking on ours, too. There was very poor communication between the hardware people and the deck builders -- or the templates were garbage. Besides the shroud eyebolts missing their core plugs, the front deck cleat & staysail padeye backing was in the wrong place by several inches. I should add, the wire routing diagram in the Ballad Handbook is slightly fictional as well. You'll encounter conduit in unexpected places, ask me how I know.

prjacobs wrote:Looking good!
One thing you might check: Just ahead of the forward cabin window are three bolts on either side holding an angle bracket that attaches the upper part of the main bulkhead to the cabin sides. The cabin sides here (between the inner liner and the outer shell) have a block of wood inserted to reinforce the area where the holes are drilled and the bolts put through.
On my Ballad the block of wood had been misplaced too far forward and there was no material at the holes between the hull liner and the outer hull. (The holes for the bolts were just past the edge of the blocks.) This made it impossible to tighten the bolts properly. I confirmed the correct block location from the German Ballad website drawings ... Albin had goofed by 100mm
Give the area a tap with your finger to confirm correct positioning of the reinforcement block. My boat sailed for over 35 years with this fault with no apparent harm, and it was an easy repair, simply drilling a 40mm hole in the inner linner at each hole and epoxying in a 40mm diameter piece of hardwood. This gave the bolts a base to compress on.

Picture of plugs in holes:

Thanks for the warning I will be sure to check the placement of the backing for the bolts tomorrow. This could explain the cracks my boat has around this area (on the outside). I had not planed on fixing the cracks until next summer but if misalignment is the root cause now would be the time to fix it (before the bulkhead goes back in). Did you thicken the epoxy in order to better fill the void around the wooden discs? I haven't done any epoxy/fiberglass work yet so any advice will be greatly appreciated The local marine supply store carries most of West Systems products. What did you use?

Bob McGovern wrote:Thanks for the heads-up, Peter. I hadn't checked those bolts yet, but you can see dimpling of the coach sides around them, so they probably missed the blocking on ours, too. There was very poor communication between the hardware people and the deck builders -- or the templates were garbage. Besides the shroud eyebolts missing their core plugs, the front deck cleat & staysail padeye backing was in the wrong place by several inches. I should add, the wire routing diagram in the Ballad Handbook is slightly fictional as well. You'll encounter conduit in unexpected places, ask me how I know.

Did you by chance come across the unexpected conduit while installing that big hatch in the cabin roof? I would love to replace the "ventilation"-thingy with a hatch at some point in time. Last week I was speaking with a fellow Ballad owner that mentioned sawing thru some conduit while installing a much smaller hatch (26x26 cm).