Keel Pin

Posted By: Bill Lempe/S21 Pegasus
Date: 4/24/08 1:23p.m.

Report: outside forum guidelines

In Response To: Keel Pin (Robert Denton)

These are my opinions/impressions I went through this drill last year, dropping the keel, replacing the pin & cable. It is a MAJOR job. What I found is that there was nothing wrong with the keel pin, but is was a lot of work to get the old one out (It is 3/4 inch stainless). Years of rust had jammed the pin so it could not be pressed out so I had to drill it out. The real problem was an earlier modification where two pieces of angle had been added to the bottom of the stationary portion of the keel (the keel-banging fix). Rust had built up between the angle and the stationary portion causing the angle to "grab" the swing keel. This caused a major amount of drag when pulling the keel up which destroyed the pulley. The cable was running on the pulley through-bolt. I did a lot of grinding to get proper clearance. I’ve only heard of one case of loosing the keel. The biggest problem is a broken cable allowing the keel to fall. 500 lbs of swing keel cast iron slamming into the stationary keel portion will most probably fracture the fiberglass around the keel trunk. The whole bottom of the boat could be lost. A good strong cable is very important! I elected not to replace the keel bolts with stainless. Most of these boats are 25+ years old and If the keel needs to be dropped again most probably someone else will be doing it (I’ll have moved on). I did replace the nuts and washers.