Filling a thru hull without using fiberglass.???

[Ric in Richmond]

Hello ladies and gents.

I have a manual bilge thru hull right below the boot stripe on the port side of the hull.

It has NO valve or seacock on it. Just a hose and some clamps.

It has me worried even though in 44 year it has never been an issue.

I would like to move it to the counter along with the electric pump output.

I really don't want to grind a bevel and fill this hole since it is at the boot stripe and will impact the stripe and the hull and that is awlgripped.

Has anyone ever seen a solid thru hull (ie. NO HOLE IN IT) that I could replace the current through hull with and use some 5200 until the time came to repaint eventually?

Barring that I may just put a seacock in it and be done with it. It is just in a PITA place at the bottom of the port cockpit locker.

Any advice is always appreciated!

[Rachel]

I'll be interested to see people's suggestions. I spent some time looking for a straight-threaded pipe cap (at one point in time) thinking that I could then remove some unused gate valves, at least temporarily, and cap off the through hulls -- but I never found anything. I ended up removing them all and then filling some of the holes and putting proper seacocks in the others.

Don't suppose you need a garboard plug just next to the boot stripe....

[Ric in Richmond]

That would be one hell of a garboard plug as this is a LARGE thru hull...maybe 2.5 in diameter. It has a large hose attached to it and would sink the boat FAST if it came loose!!!

[Rachel]

Oh my - that is a pretty good-sized hole!

One other possibility comes to mind (and I know you said it's in an awkward location in the cockpit locker, so this may not suit the situation).

That is to make a good bevel on the inside, and lay your patches in there with something good and sturdy, like multiple layers of biaxmat; then on the outside I wonder if you could just fill the hole with thickened epoxy and maybe a thin later of cloth that only overlaps by a small bit. If you then touched that up with paint - and weren't looking for it with a scrutinizing eye - it might work.

I'm not sure that the patch only on the inside would be sufficient, but it does work the opposite way with the patches on the outside and minimal work on the inside.

Rachel

[Tim]

Can you thread a pipe cap on the inside of the through hull and seal it that way? Some sealant on the threads an you'd be good to go.

[Rachel]

In retrospect, I suppose I could have done that - I was afraid to put an NPT cap on a NPS through hull. But I bet you're right that with some sealant it would have worked fine.

Oh well, it "forced" me to put in proper seacocks, so it wasn't all bad :)