I took a look at the Javelin tonight and thought I would start by seeing if I could remove the brass water pick-up pipe that was mounted against the propeller and needed to be re-located to allow the propeller to be able to turn.
My reason for looking at the Javelin was to fit some strakes while I had a good fixing method fresh in my mind that had worked well on the Rapier yesterday.
The brass pick-up tube had gone brittle and sheared-off fairly easily. When I tried to remove the remains of the threaded brass stub there was a cracking sound and a small sheet of filler paste snapped off from the area around the rudder and water pick-up - and it had actually covered over the mounting nuts of both.
With the filler paste now broken away in that immeadiate area, I inserted a new rudder and it is now able to rotate - something that it could not do previously due to the heavy coating of filler paste in that area.
The entire hull is beautifully smooth and I now suspect that it has been entirely covered over with filler paste - and from what I can see from the fractured piece that has come away - it has been applied over the existing shiny blue painted hull, so it will have had no preparation and is unlikely to be secure and if left, it would be liable to fracture off at any time in the future - and that could be embarrassing!
Now I know this I will have to remove all of this filler paste to expose the wood underneath (and give me something something solid to glue the strakes onto), but I also need to see if anything has been hidden under this coat of filler paste that may also need some attention (what a suspicious mind!).
This will be a messy job that would be better done outdoors, so the Javelin is likely to get put away again until we see some warmer weather.
Before giving up on the boat (for now) I did shorten the prop shaft by 7/8" as one end of the shaft had very little inner shaft protruding into the engine bay and its rusted threaded section was turning inside the prop shaft bearing!
By cutting the prop shaft down at the transom end I also moved the prop forwards by 7/8" so that can only be a good thing. I fitted an X50 prop and there is still a lot of clearance under the hull for it to rotate easily if I ever needed to use a prop this big and it should help the performance of the boat.
The inner shaft now enters the engine bay with enough exposed shaft for me to be able to cut off the rusted end of the shaft and still leave enough plain shaft for me to get an M5 collet fitted and to use my preferred M5 Plain shaft PowerFlex coupling.
While the inner shaft was out I rolled it on the machined band saw table surface and it rolled true with no whip.
I reinserted the nylon (!) bearing that was left inside the part of the tube that I had cut off, but I will probably change both bearings at some stage for a pair made from phospher bronze (if I can find a short length to machine down) or I could use some brass bar, or ask around to see if I can buy a new pair of bearings that are "ready made" so I only have to press them in.
This is looking like it could turn into another major rebuild rather than a minor refit.....how lucky am I ?