CONTINUOUSWAVE

I recently picked up a 1977 Harpoon 5.2. The owner said I could have the 1977 Harpoon 5.2 if I could get it out of a vacant lot totally overgrown with Brazilian Pepper trees. Trees were intertwined with trailer and rigging--I had to bring my chainsaw.

This 1977 Harpoon 5.2 had been used since 1986 as a earthworm farm. No wood remains in the interior. The rest of the 1977 Harpoon 5.2 is amazingly complete and intact.

Q1: Besides mahogany or teak or cedar, what wood would be good for the interior wood components of a 1977 Harpoon 5.2?

Some suggest exotic woods.

I have found the CAD drawings for the interior wood.

Thanks.

Pine, spruce, and Douglas fir have often been used to fabricate components of sail boats. The choice of wood usually is made with consideration of the particular interior wood component of a sailboat that is to be fabricated from the wood.

I'm also about to re-do the wood in my 5.2 Harpoon. I was going to have a local company CNC-cut the pieces from the AutoCad files. I planned to use Mahogany, but haven't done much research. I plan to read up on the Yahoo Harpoon list to see what others have done.

In our area cypress is available. It is attractive and rot resistant. Much of the cypress sold was cut from salvaged trees rescued from swamps and bayous where it may have been sunk several centuries ago. I've seen some cypress tables that were finished but I don't know how it is usually finished.

This might be sacrilege and raise eyebrows, but I have been pondering the idea of replacing all the wood with KING StarBoard. The boat will sit in our Florida lake all year. [My focus is] on practically and workability, and not on originality.

Using white plastic to replace all the wood on a Boston Whaler will not improve the appearance. I expect it would be a negative for a buyer. I replaced all the teak except the large swim platform on a previously owned SeaRay. I was disappointed with the result as the boat no longer looked quite right. The man hours required for the project probably exceeded the man hours that would have been expended for teak maintenance for five years.

If offering advice in reply to your initial question, and if given the choice between white plastic or wood of mahogany, teak, cedar, pine, Douglas fir, spruce, or cypress, I would chose any of those woods over white plastic. The KING StarBoard material is quite dense. Making the interior from that material would increase the weight of the boat. Generally on a small sailboat, weight is not an asset for sailing performance.

To reduce the amount of maintenance needed for wood objects that will be exposed to the weather, wood can be top coating with a clear epoxy resin, which will completely seal and waterproof the wood. Then a traditional varnish with good ultra-violet light blocking properties can be applied atop the epoxy. This will produce a wood finish that will be very durable and should require minimum upkeep.