Broken strop on my SEAL 28 - 3

​The keel needed to be lifted so that the top stud could be withdrawn, and the two strops removed and replaced with new ones. The remaining unbroken strop could not be trusted to take the weight using the winch, so the keel had to be lifted from below.[1] I made some blocks by cutting up some 4 x 2 timber—44 mm x 93 mm by my measure—together with some spacers of 18 mm plywood. A substantial lever was essential—I could not rely on borrowing one from the boatyard—and a custom 50 mm square box-girder, 2 mm wall thickness, 2.5 m length was acquired by Chris from a local metal shop (I could just get this length in my car). Using this I was able to lift the keel and get a hydraulic lever-arm jack underneath—see Figure 3.

[1] The breaking strain of the wire rope when new is around two tonnes, but the unbroken strop had been subject to considerable strain. Also, using just one strop would unbalance the brass block which could then jam or strip. In any event, I could not take the risk of damage to the jack or the strop breaking.

​Using the jack, I could lift the keel and block it sufficiently high enough so that there was room to get a vertically lifting hydraulic bottle jack underneath. I could now raise and lower the keel to the extent of the jack’s lift without worrying that the small transverse movement of the end of the lever-arm jack might allow it to slip off the keel. I lifted the keel until it was flush with the stub keel—see Figure 4. I didn’t feel that the pile of blocks was sufficiently stable, so I replaced them with two axle stands—Figure 5.