Storm damage to cleats

[Bel]

Cyclone Dovi passed through NZ on the weekend and despite all our efforts Sea Jac sustained some damage in Tauranga marina where she is currently tied up.
The 55 knot winds caused big swells and a couple of aft cleats broke and one was torn completely out.
Not looking forward to the repair bill - new stainless steel cleats aren't available until May so we've been recommended to use some brass composite/polymer ones.

Has anyone had experience with them?

They are supposed to match stainless in breaking strain. They are still NZ$1200 each and that's without having the fitted and the damage repaired. Hopefully insurance will cover it.

 

[RT Firefly]

Greetings,
Mr. B. Have you considered replacing the "horned" hawse pipes with plain ones and installing stout cleats right on the deck? IF you have ready access, I suspect a stronger set up can be achieved with a good backing plate. It may be less expensive and quicker (supply-wise). Just a thought.

 

[BruceK]

Very sorry to hear of the damage, that`s not good, hope insurance sees it all fixed nicely.

But $1200 for a cleat?! Typo? I recently bought a 10 inch approx mooring cleat,admittedly gal steel,to mount on the dock,cost about $10.
Bronze cleats are common, your damaged one doesn`t look to be stainless steel.

 

[koliver]

Greetings,
Mr. B. Have you considered replacing the "horned" hawse pipes with plain ones and installing stout cleats right on the deck? IF you have ready access, I suspect a stronger set up can be achieved with a good backing plate. It may be less expensive and quicker (supply-wise). Just a thought.

I have often wondered whether those horned hawse holes were strong enough. Your experience shows that they are not.
Put a stout cleat on the deck, properly backed with 1/4" Aluminum plate. Then you will still need new hawse holes, but the total should be more manageable than what you are seeing for the horned hawses. (easy for me to say, not being familiar with the Kiwi marketplace)

 

[mvweebles]

Cyclone Dovi passed through NZ on the weekend and despite all our efforts Sea Jac sustained some damage in Tauranga marina where she is currently tied up.
The 55 knot winds caused big swells and a couple of aft cleats broke and one was torn completely out.
Not looking forward to the repair bill - new stainless steel cleats aren't available until May so we've been recommended to use some brass composite/polymer ones.

Has anyone had experience with them?

They are supposed to match stainless in breaking strain. They are still NZ$1200 each and that's without having the fitted and the damage repaired. Hopefully insurance will cover it.

Interesting comment - I am not familiar with composite cleats of this size. Do you happen to have a link to something similar?

Thanks for the pictures. Pretty amazing. Not a fan of hawse pipe cleats either, but for convenience reasons. I just never found them easy to use compared to Caprail mounted cleats. The horns always looked a bit fragile, but never occurred to me the way they mount may not be secure.

Best of luck with your repairs.

Peter

 

[eagle419]

The 55 knot winds caused big swells and a couple of aft cleats broke and one was torn completely out.

Not looking forward to the repair bill - new stainless steel cleats aren't available until May so we've been recommended to use some brass composite/polymer ones.

In the absence of an insurance fix, another approach that might be quicker/cheaper is to have separate hawsehole and cleat as my Previous Owner did.

I added the bulwark cleat with a fat backing plate which I find quicker and easier when single handing.

 

[Bel]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I have put the suggestions to the boatbuilder doing the repairs and hopefully we can find a solution - there are 4 aft and two forward cleats so it would be much cheaper to find an off-the-shelf solution.
Also we discovered they hadn't been sealed properly and had been back-filled with expanding foam which was pretty hopeless.

 

[Comodave]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I have put the suggestions to the boatbuilder doing the repairs and hopefully we can find a solution - there are 4 aft and two forward cleats so it would be much cheaper to find an off-the-shelf solution.
Also we discovered they hadn't been sealed properly and had been back-filled with expanding foam which was pretty hopeless.

Are you saying the expanding foam wasn’t a good backer…

 

[O C Diver]

To understand the failure of the cleat that broke, it's important to understand how to properly tie to a cleat. When bringing a line to a cleat, you should take one full turn around the base of the cleat before overlapping the horns. The horned hawse pipe lacks the stout base of a comparative size cleat. The base is twice the size on a traditional cleat as compared to the one that broke. Simply, that design lacks the strength of a traditional cleat.

As others have mentioned, a traditional cleat with proper backing plate, attached through a more solid surface (such as the deck), would be exponentially stronger.

Ted

 

[Peter B]

Cyclone Dovi passed through NZ on the weekend and despite all our efforts Sea Jac sustained some damage in Tauranga marina where she is currently tied up.
The 55 knot winds caused big swells and a couple of aft cleats broke and one was torn completely out.
Not looking forward to the repair bill - new stainless steel cleats aren't available until May so we've been recommended to use some brass composite/polymer ones.

Has anyone had experience with them?

They are supposed to match stainless in breaking strain. They are still NZ$1200 each and that's without having the fitted and the damage repaired. Hopefully insurance will cover it.

I'm a bit puzzled by the way that one in the bottom two pics was ripped out intact. It looks like the direction of pull on the cleat was all wrong..? Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally the line should come in through the hawse hole, be wrapped around the cleat, then looped off on the horns, and the direction of pull should be such as to virtually be trying to pull the whole cleat and hawse out through the bulwark..?

In the pics it looks like the direction of pull was from inside the boat somehow..? Was the line lead out over some other surface - or was it pulled right out through the bulwark, and you've just brought it back in through the hole to photograph it..?

And yes, it looks like the originals were bronze anyway, so why try to replace with hideously expensive stainless which is no stronger, and doesn't look as 'boaty salty'..?

 

[angus99]

Port Townsend Foundry makes heavy duty hawse cleats that are through-bolted, vs screwed into the hull. Horned cleats can be beefed up by welding a bar across the hawsehole, essentially turning the horns into one long bar. A little less convenient, but significantly stronger, I’m told.

https://www.porttownsendfoundry.com/hawseholes

 

[bowball]

Here’s how Fleming does it on their f55. I would be surprised they would have horns if they felt they weren’t strong enough? ( fairly certain this is Fleming)

 

[CharlieO.]

I saw an Albin where the horns didn't snap off but bent to the point of almost exiting the hawse hole allowing the line to pull through.

 

[SeaMoose]

More Cleat Advice

Same thing happened to my midships cleat the first year I was on Lake Erie which has "tides" (due to wind pushing the water to one end or another of the lake)

Unable to get underneath the top of the gunwales, I drilled 3/4 inch holes, filled them with epoxy/cabosil, and gently set the cleat and the screws in to the wet epoxy, securing the cleat with blue tape.

20 years later that cleat is still solidly mounted.

 

[Bel]

I'm a bit puzzled by the way that one in the bottom two pics was ripped out intact. It looks like the direction of pull on the cleat was all wrong..? Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally the line should come in through the hawse hole, be wrapped around the cleat, then looped off on the horns, and the direction of pull should be such as to virtually be trying to pull the whole cleat and hawse out through the bulwark..?

In the pics it looks like the direction of pull was from inside the boat somehow..? Was the line lead out over some other surface - or was it pulled right out through the bulwark, and you've just brought it back in through the hole to photograph it..?


Yes I'm not sure how that happened, there was nothing wrong with the way it was tied, and its a bit weird how it ended up on the deck. I'll ask if the marina staff moved it when they re-secured the boat.

 

[Ric]

https://www.trawlerforum.com/forums/s3/cleat-failure-your-experience-46172.html
Page 2 has a similar failure.
Bel, we are in NZ also. We've had good luck getting gear from the UK or US via TNT. Got an electronic bit from the UK bought and delivered for $125 when the same item, unavailable in NZ, was A$538 plus shipping from Australia. Unfortunately most of the horned cleats are made by ABI and currently unavailable. Port Townsend Supply does have them, don't know the price though. In terms of strength, the separate cleat solution is better.

 

[Bel]

Bel, we are in NZ also. We've had good luck getting gear from the UK or US via TNT. Got an electronic bit from the UK bought and delivered for $125 when the same item, unavailable in NZ, was A$538 plus shipping from Australia. Unfortunately most of the horned cleats are made by ABI and currently unavailable. Port Townsend Supply does have them, don't know the price though. In terms of strength, the separate cleat solution is better.[/QUOTE]




Thanks, I think that's why they were suggesting we cast them here rather than try to source them offshore!

 

[Capt Ray]

This is the second pic of a failed hawse cleat that I have seen this month!

The first is in this intersting Youtube video:

 

[angus99]

This has been discussed on the DeFever Forum extensively because a lot of DeFevers were fitted with these cleats. The two most popular solutions have been to replace them with more robust cleats that through-bolt to one another, creating a hull “sandwich,” or—as I mentioned above—welding a bar across the horns to resist compression.

A third option is to add a bollard.

 

[garbler]

I’ve got a box full of failed or improperly made, or installed, deck and hull fittings. The attached photos depict one of two foredeck cleats that ripped out on a mooring in moderately heavy weather in Marblehead Harbor. Photos show a substantial 10” anodized alum cleat thru-bolted to the foredeck to utilize bow chocks and/or platform roller chocks. The underside photo says it all, shockingly insufficient backing plate geometry and footprint and nice sharp corners for cleaving a solid GRP deck panel. The lack of a decent bedding job and galvanic wastage of the cleat counter bores in way of the SS machine screws is really of no significance now other than to reveal how many steps the builder missed. Regardless of how thorough a surveyor is during the hull inspection there was no way to get a view of this mess, too many unremovable interferences short of destruction. This was a very well regarded builder so reputation is not always reliable. Too many craft sold these days bury stuff like this so it’s no wonder more and more casualties cross the line as too costly to repair and end up as CTL’s ( constructive total loss )

 

[Bel]

Wow, I guess we were really lucky to have as little damage as we did.

That video was amazing. What a machine to get itself out of that marsh.

 

[CharlieO.]

Wow, I guess we were really lucky to have as little damage as we did.

That video was amazing. What a machine to get itself out of that marsh.

I was amazed that the boat sustained that abuse and just kept going.

 

[kchace]

I was amazed that the boat sustained that abuse and just kept going.

Yes. Amazingly, they have made it to FL.

 

[CharlieO.]

Yes. Amazingly, they have made it to FL.

Have you done any plowing in your Albin? Or do you have to have the Cummins for that?

Beautiful boat you have!