Recycling and Refurbishing Old Boats

Bringing "Junk Boats" and Other Components Back to Life by Jerry Culik

Over the past couple of years there’s been increasing discussion in the professional boat building community on how to deal with the aging fleet of powerboats and sailboats produced during the heyday of fiberglass boat construction (see, for example, “Vanishing Acts“ in Professional Boatbuilder #190, Apr/May 2021). If you are caring for and keeping a classic-plastic boat out of the landfill, you’re already doing your part. But there are many boats that, for one reason or another, do not share that fate. And recycling is what needs to happen. As a small boater, and a frugal builder, I’m always on the lookout for sources of low-cost boat building materials and components. And “junk” boats, which can often be procured for just the cost of removal, can be a great source of useful stuff. We need someone to help keep old hardware and other useful parts like aluminum spars, sails, and outboards out of the landfills – and it might as well be you.

If you agree, and as just one example of a useful donor boat, consider buying an over-the-hill racing dinghy, especially at the end of the sailing season. First generation Lasers are now reaching 50 years in age. My 1983 Laser was raced hard, and although the deck became “spongy” and the hull is far from pristine, the hardware on it, all from Holt and Harken, looks good as new. The classified ads on the one-design class websites are also potential sources for hulls, hardware, sails, and masts as their skippers replace or upgrade gear. There are over 700 Laser fleets in North America; and more than 200,000 Lasers have been produced since they were first introduced 50 years ago. The Flying Scot class has more than 200 fleets across the US and, like Lasers, new boats and replacement hulls are also still being built. Uffa Fox’s classic Day Sailer, originally produced by O’Day, is still available from Cape Cod Shipbuilding, and the Day Sailer Association lists 136 US fleets across the US and notes that more than 10,000 boats have been built. If that’s not encouraging enough, bargain-priced O’Day dinghies like the Javelin and Mariner—usually in need of major repairs -- seem to show up regularly on Craigslist.

In addition to current racing fleets, you might look for retired boats from yacht club sailing schools (many who teach using Laser and Sunfish dinghies) and from local racing fleets with shrinking memberships. When you find out which small boats are used for teaching and racing in your area, you’ll have a good idea of what you might find on Craigslist or at flea markets. Flying Junior (FJ) and 420s are used by many high school and collegiate fleets; I’ve seen older boats offered for sale at very reasonable prices as these heavily used fleets get updated with new boats.

Probably the easiest and richest payoff is recycling the running rigging of a sailboat. Many were built using premium blocks, winches, and other hardware from Allen, Harken, Lewmar, Ronstan, and Schaefer. And the hardware on trailersailers, which might sit inside or under cover, usually has many more years of useful life; the worst damage I’ve seen is degradation of sheaves due to UV. And nearly every manufacturer can supply replacement parts if you want to rebuild them.

Sails

Many older sails can be repurposed without too much trouble. You might acquire one by hanging around the big boat sailors, or find them listed on a marina’s bulletin board. And several on-line companies make a market for serviceable used sails. The biggest issue is figuring out if a particular used sail will fit your existing or planned rig. To help, Bacon Sails in Annapolis, MD, has a search page by sail type and dimensions. Minneys Yacht Surplus, located in Costa Mesa/Newport Beach, CA, has separate pages for headsails, mainsails, and spinnakers with dimensions. Second Wind Sails in Fort Lauderdale looks like a great source for used sails if you’re in Florida.

Once you figure out appropriate luff and foot dimensions, you need to investigate the condition of the sail and what features it has, and what modifications you want. A sail designed to feed into a slotted mast can be converted to slides without too much trouble. Reefing can be added to most mainsails that have none, and adding additional reefing points is also very doable. A hanked-on sail can be modified for roller reefing. If you want to try some DIY mods or repairs, snag a copy of Emiliano Marino’s Sailmaker's Apprentice so that you can see how to do it right. If you can’t find something that will fit, but are willing to do some cutting and seaming, consider starting with a larger sail and recutting it. Marino walks you through the process in his book. It’s not too hard to see how, with a little ingenuity, an old mainsail can make a dandy lug, junk, or leg-o-mutton sail (hint: use the leech as the starting edge). I figure that if plastic tarps can make serviceable, low-cost sails, so can recycled Dacron – as long as I’m not racing. And, of course, sails that are past their usefulness as sails make decent tarps and other coverings.

While most of these older sails were built for big boats, dinghy racers also invest in new sails to stay competitive, and their old sails also show up, usually with plenty of life left in them. Based on a quick look, it seems like old Finn sails seem to be popular around Annapolis. And I have a pile of still-crisp Penguin sails gifted to me by an ex-racer who was cleaning out his garage. Sometimes you can find used non-Bermudan sails—the little Optimist dinghies have a 35 sq-ft spritsail that would make a nice mizzen on a bigger boat. And used gunter and gaff sails (from the log canoes that race around the Chesapeake Bay?) even seem to be available on the used sail listings.

Masts and Booms

Finding usable spars to recycle on a small boat project should not be too difficult – just look around any boatyard for broken masts and booms. But the easiest and cheapest way to procure a good used rig is to find an old boat that’s on its way to the landfill; someone is going to snag the aluminum for its scrap value, and it might as well be you. I’ve also found some nice small boat rigs at boat flea markets and consignment shops. Saltwater corrosion and other damage is always a concern, so make sure that you carefully inspect the spars before you get too far along. It might be possible to trim the mast foot or head and re-attach the hardware without even requiring modifications to the sail.

Hobie 14s and 16s are a great donor choice for spars because there is a large stock of the older fiberglass catamarans out there. They’re usually a bargain if the mast is not bent or badly corroded, and you’ll frequently also get a decent trailer in the deal. If the hulls and the trampoline are in good shape, someone who is still sailing or racing might be interested in buying spares (fiberglass beach cat hulls tend to wear out along the bottoms). Hobie masts and booms are plenty strong enough for small boats. The H16 mast is a 3x4-½” extrusion about 26’ in length; the H14 mast is a little over 22’ long; and they both have shroud/stay fittings for a fractional 2/3-rig. You could cut about 2 feet off the top of an H16 mast if you want a ¾-rig. The H16 boom is a 1-¾x2-¾” extrusion and is about 9’ long, and it can also be trimmed down to fit a small boat.

A recent look around Craigslist (using Search Tempest) showed dozens of lateen-rigged Sunfish for sale, from $1 to over $3,000. The mast on a Sunfish is 2-¼” in diameter and 10’ long. Sunfish gaff and boom spars are both 1-½” aluminum tubing, 14’ long, and that same extrusion seems to be common on many other small dinghies and trailer-sailers. Laser and Force 5 masts have multi-part masts with sleeved sails. They are very easy to break down, transport, and store. The aluminum alloy used for masts is 6061-T6 and the tubing typically has a wall thickness of 0.065” (or 0.083” and 0.125” for the larger diameters). Alan Stewart (of B&B Yacht Designs) showed how to build a tapered, multi-section aluminum mast – with sail tracks – for his Core Sound 15 (watch his videos at CS15 Build - Part 12 and Part 13). I built a cheap 2-part mast that can be carried in a 10-foot dinghy by combining a well-used Laser boom, which is 9’ long and 2” in diameter, a broken section of Sunfish boom, and some PVC tubing for spacers. A short section of 2-¼” thick-wall aluminum tubing became the mast partner for the free-standing mast.

Before the advent of carbon fiber, windsurfers all had fiberglass masts. They might seem to be a little too bendy, but for very small dinghies, old windsurfer masts can make a low-cost and forgiving freestanding rig. In a gust, the top of the sail will bend off and might prevent a capsize. One problem with a fiberglass mast is that you probably want to stick with some kind of “sleeved” sail and a leg-of-mutton sprit boom so you don’t weaken the mast by drilling too many holes in it. Old windsurfer wishbones also have a use as sprit booms, and many can be extended fairly easily to fit a repurposed sail.

Although the rigging on small boats is usually oversized and under-stressed, it’s still important to carefully inspect any stainless steel fitting and all shrouds and stays for corrosion cracks and broken strands. The presence of “meat hooks” is a clear indicator of shroud wire damage. But trailersailers and dinghies tend to suffer more bent hardware during transport and mast raising. Thoroughly inspect turnbuckles, chain plates, and mast steps for damage, corrosion and cracks before you reuse them to rig your mast. If you’re really lucky, you might score a weight-saving tapered wood or aluminum mast, which were used on Penguins and a lot of good old racing dinghies.

Electronics

Small, hand-held electronics are probably the easiest gear to recycle. A vintage Garmin 76 GPS might only have a monochrome screen and take a while to locate satellites, but it will still give your position, heading, and speed. The ni-cad battery for a handheld VHF might be shot, but if you’ve got the “backup” power pack for AAA or AA cells and the electrical contacts are not corroded away—and the antenna is not broken—it should still do the job (and the antenna can usually be replaced). For any handheld equipment that doesn't get much use, I always recommend using Energizer “Ultimate Lithium” batteries, which have a very long storage lifetime and won’t leak.

Like smartphones, VHF radios become “obsolete” when upgraded models are introduced. All new fixed-mount radios now have Digital Selective Calling (DSC); and GPS and Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers are being added to many radios. Some high-end VHF “systems” even have additional features like man-overboard (MOB) and security monitoring. All of this technology can be very useful, depending on how and where you sail. And now that the U.S. Coast Guard’s “Rescue 21” system* is up and running, a VHF radio with DSC and GPS – and a registered MMSI number—can perform like a coastal EPIRB when a MAYDAY call is triggered by the radio. As they are replaced, older VHF radios without DSC will flood the used bargain tables. An older radio might still be useful—as a backup to a fuller-featured VHF radio.

Depth sensors are usually pretty bullet-proof; it’s the displays that usually bite the dust. So unless you like troubleshooting, it’s probably more prudent to invest in a new depth gauge rather than trying to resuscitate a vintage system, especially now that many low-cost fishfinders will also give you boat speed as well as bottom depth and condition. I have not invested in a used chartplotter or other NMEA instruments yet, but the standardized interfaces should make it easier to deal with interconnectability —and upgrading when necessary or useful. As skippers upgrade to bigger chartplotters, there should be many low-cost opportunities to experiment with the previous equipment generation.

* see USCG DSC VHF Radio Rescue 21

Hull Materials

After you strip off the hardware, spars, and electronics off of an old boat, what to do with a hull? Your local landfill might accept the hull for a nominal fee. However, there is a growing list of articles discussing the concept of repurposing old sailboats into compact trawlers. For example, Frank Durant recently described his conversion of an O’Day Mariner in Small Craft Advisor #129 (May/June 2021). If you need more inspiration, consider the launch and trawler conversions that the Sailboat Company has accomplished by converting old Com-Pac sailboats.

Frank Durant’s Mariner trawler

A seriously damaged racing dinghy also has a lot of potential for modification. And at the risk of incurring the wrath of small boat restoration advocates, I’m going to suggest that butchering an old boat like a Sunfish or a Laser (of which there are many)—in order to reuse the hull—is a good way to keep most of it out of the landfill. Using Craigslist I’ve acquired several abused, waterlogged, and holed ‘Fish that I bought mainly for their spars and mahogany foils. But when disposing of the broken hulls became a problem, I took a closer look and saw that the hard-chined Sunfish hull might become an excellent starting point for constructing a nice, dry sharpie cruiser. And once the hull-deck joint was split and the deck removed, I could easily get at and repair major damage to the hull. It was very easy to repair the holes and even strengthen the original hull. My recycled “Frankenfish” now has a bulletproof hull, and the added topsides will keep me much drier. On my new-old boat I even reused the old Sunfish foredeck and the mast step. The daggerboard case and cockpit are already built in! And it’s easy to come up with ways to add some water ballasting for improving the stability without hiking out.

If I cut up an old boat hull, especially one that was built with okoume or marine plywood that was glassed, I try to salvage as much of the panels as I can. As long as they are not rotting, they can be reused for many of the smaller parts on my next project, saving plywood, glass, and epoxy. And cut-offs from old fiberglass runabouts can even be recycled into many creative solutions…

Pieces of a 1960s plastic classic runabout and a Sunfish, originally headed to the landfill, now recycled on a Franken-trawler

Final Thoughts

Marty Loken recently highlighted several small shantyboats that you can build (see his Shallow Draft column in Small Craft Advisor #138, Nov/Dec 2022). In particular, I saw that Glen-L’s “Gypsy” differs from the other shantyboat designs by combining a speedboat’s hull with a comfortable shanty cabin, producing a power houseboat that’s still trailerable and could easily double as a slick RV. By using a recycle/reuse approach to building a “hybrid Gypsy,” a stripped-out powerboat hull could make a dandy starting point and would save a major part of the shantyboat construction process. And in the process you could repurpose a cheap powerboat that’s past its prime—and maybe headed for the landfill. Just sayin’... •SCA•

Glen-L’s Gypsy design

Resources: Marine Recycling and Consignment Companies

●      Don’s Marine Surplus, Clearwater, FL (donsmarinesalvageyard.com)

●      Longship Marine, Poulsbo, WA (longshipmarine.com)

●      Marine Thrift, Port Townsend, WA (nwmaritime.org/marine-thrift)

●      Minney’s Yacht Surplus, Costa Mesa, CA (minneysyachtsurplus.com)

●      Newport Nautical Supply, Newport, RI (newportnautical.com)

●      Rock Hall Marine Consignment, Rock Hall, MD (rockhallmarine.com)

●      Sailorman, Fort Lauderdale, FL (sailorman.com)

●      Sailors Exchange, St. Augustine, FL (sailors-exchange.com)

●      The Boaters Resale Shop of Texas, Kemah, TX (boatersresaleshopoftexas.com)