No nuts on Stern Rail bolts

[Roc]

Hi all...
I happened to notice that there are NO Nuts on the bolts that attach the stern rail to the transom.  At every verticle rail attachment point, there are bolts that come through the fiberglass, only protrude through about 1/4", and there are no nuts with lock washers attached.  The bolts used aren't even long enough to have bolts and washers on them in the first place.  Can those of you with MkII's look into the aft lazarettes and see if yours are like that too.  I plan on calling Catalina to see if this was on purpose, or did someone forget to finish the stern rail installation job when the boat was built.  I have no leaks....which is good...wish I noticed this when I bought the boat so the dealer would have fixed this.  Curious if other boats are like this too. May have been a widespread production issue...my hull is 1477.

[Craig Illman]

Roc - there may be aluminum plates glassed into the hull? There certainly are for the cabin top clutches.

Craig

[Roc]

Craig,
I did think of that and hopefully that is the case. I'm wondering if other MKII's are the same.  If so, there may be aluminum plates glassed in.  I know around the time that I bought my boat, Catalina (and all boat manufacturers) were cranking out boats and had a hard time even keeping up with orders.  My thought is this could be something that was overlooked....

[John Sheehan]

Roc,

Just checked ours and it is the same as yours.  The glass is quite thick in that area and it could well have a plate inbedded in it.  Ours has not become loose or showing any signs of leakage. 

John

[Jim Hardesty]

Had mine off a couple of seasons ago to re-bed all stanchions.  My starboard aft stanchion had a drilled and taped aluminum plate sandwich into the fiberglass deck.  The screws were the same length as the rest, so they did go through, just not very much.  Think that the factory did that because of the cabinet in the head.  Wish they did that with all the stanchions a much better way.  May be years ago when fender washers were thicker they worked OK for backing up the stanchions.  Mine were all concaved and wouldn't allow good tightening of the screws.  I bought back up plates from Gauhauser( I think), they were just the plates that the stanchions are welded from.  Not advertised but low cost and just a call to customer service.
Jim

[Ed Shankle]

I found the imbedded plate while drilling a hole for my GPS antenna wire some years back. So what you theorize is true at least for my 89. I thought perhaps they did that to spread the load from the split backstay.

Ed