Got Butyl?

Whether you have a shiny new boat, or a lovingly restored Good Old Boat, you need to know how to properly bed hardware on deck or you will eventually create a nightmare that is hard to wake up from. Take this from a man who scooped balsa-turned-chocolate-pudding out of his rotten decks.

There's a myriad of goops you can use to seal things, and almost all of them tend to be a bad choice.  One of the more popular marine sealants is incredibly expensive, and incredibly hard to clean excess ooze from.  It also cures much faster than you typically want it to.

Then there's butyl tape.  It's not marine-specific, and is in fact used by the RV industry also.  It lasts 30+ years, leaves no residue, has better elasticity than most marine products, and allows you to easily pull and reposition something that you set incorrectly.  If you spend time researching best practices for sealing deck hardware, you will also find that most of the people who really know what they are doing swear by it.  Hands down.

The thing that I am baffled by is how hard it is to buy the stuff.  There's a wide spectrum of quality, so you can't just buy whatever you find and expect success.  This is something all marine chandleries and your local West Marine should be stocking, pushing, and selling like mad.  But that's just not the case. 

Until the day of rejoice in which the enlightened mariners of the world embrace an expectation of getting butyl in their own city's stores, please support someone who has done a lot to support the rest of us guys trying to learn how to do it right so we can afford to sail. 

Compass Marine Butyl Tape

I used this tape to rebed just about everything on my boat.  It's very high quality stuff.  Buy more than you need so you have it on hand long before it's needed.  A big part of doing the job right is having what's needed to get it done on-hand when the time comes so you're not tempted to cheese-ball the project.