Building Your Own Tools — Rigging Doctor

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Building Your Own Tools

We had some serious rot in our bulkhead. The bottom portion of the bulkhead rotted away from years of abutting the shower. 

The rot was so extensive that it converted all the plywood into mulch. Not decayed wood or soft wood, but mulch. Mulch! 

Since I felt more like a gardener getting the mulch out of the hole in the wall, I figured it would be best to use gardening tools for such a project. 

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I needed something that was like a robust spoon, and something that would scrape the rotting wood off the fiberglass hull. I picked up this cheap metal fork-like instrument at a local dollar store, which was easily bent into the ideal shape for the job.

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Large channel locks provided the leverage to easily bend the cheap metal into more of a scraper, and a little more bending would make it a robust and scratchy spoon! 

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This nasty gizmo worked well to scrape up rotten mulch from the hole in the wall, as well as pull the mulch out of the hole so that it could be dumped into a dumpster!

Getting rotten wood out of your boat is a great way to inspire creativity in tool design. Yay!