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Lightning Travel Cover Removal Aid Lightning 15228 November 15, 2009 Say you have traveled to a regatta with your boat fully covered with travel covers -- top and bottom -- and the cranes are not working, and there are not two strong guys around to lift the stern for you as you pull the bottom cover out from between the rear trailer bunk and the boat bottom. What are you going to do? The answer is -- use the travel cover removal aid! We got the idea -- but not the plans -- from Jim Dillard at the 2009 Doc Gilbert Memorial Potomac Cup Regatta, and always wanted to make one. Thanks to the persistence of my next door neighbor, Joe Kimak (who, once too many times, got down on hands and knees under the stern to lift with his legs ) we finally developed plans and followed them to create this two-piece (for ease of storage and transporting) device:
The idea is to crank the trailer tongue all the way down, slip the pieces under the stern, bolt them together, and, after blocking both trailer wheels fore and aft (no need to have the trailer move while the stern is lifted), to crank the tongue back up until there is a two-inch gap between the boat bottom and the trailer bunk. Once the gap is there, it is an easy task to pull the bottom cover forward and away from the boat. Here is a picture of the assembled unit:
And here is a picture of it in place under the stern, before cranking the tongue up:
Developing the curve of the mating surface was a trial-and-error process. We started by making paper templates, trimming them to match the curve of the boat's bottom, then translating them to 3/4-inch plywood and sawing with a jigsaw, using a 35 degree bevel in order to get a good match all around. It took several attempts to get a good match. In the pictures, the carpeting hides the complexity of the cuts. The vertical pieces are 2 x 10 lumber, and we accidentally selected pressure-treated wood from the rack at Home Depot, focusing on a piece that was straight-grained and not warped, and not expensive. But it was very dense, and difficult to cut and to drill. However, it should outlast the boat. Dimensions can be supplied, on request.
David Thompson
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