BALLASTING THE POTTER 15


Adding Weight Where it Counts | Article by Glenn Wilson |


about ballasting the boat since I mostly sail alone and don’t have a crew to move around and balance things out. And, yes, there have been times when some added weight would have been very beneficial. Months ago, I was reading an article about the Scamp, and


I


it mentioned water ballasting. I kept going back over that paragraph and wondering if I could do that with my Potter. An investigation into the construction of the Potter cabin floor and centerboard trunk pretty much ruled out water ballasting, since I really didn’t want to destroy integrity of fiberglass structures around the centerboard trunk. Te next question was “how much ballast?” I figured my Pot-


ter was “about” the same size and beam as a Scamp and—that being said—what is good for the Scamp should be good enough for me. So, 170 pounds of ballast was my goal and I ended up at 185…initially focusing my attention on iron ballast bars. Unfortunately, a local foundry wanted $500 for them and it would be four months before I could take delivery. So, I turned my attention to lead and started investigating


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have owned a Potter 15 for awhile now—it’s a fine little craſt and I enjoy it immensely, but from time to time I’ve thought


online sources, quickly concluding that casting lead wasn’t an option, and the cost of already-cast lead was prohibitive. To the Internet I went, and to the conclusion that casting lead was not an option. I have cast both lead and Babbitt metal before—but not in these amounts. Special tools and pots would be needed. And, then there’s the danger of harmful vapors when melting lead. But just about the time I was concluding that lead wasn’t


an option, I ran into ads for “wake ballast bags.” These are 50-pound bags of lead pellets that wakeboard boat owners buy to add weight to the stern of their boats, hoping to create larger wakeboarding waves. Te downside was that I couldn’t have loose bags of lead flopping around the boat, creating chaos in the event of a knockdown. So, I moved on. But then I came back to the lead pellets. I got the idea that I


could cast the pellets into a form of concrete by substituting the lead pellets for the stone in the typical 3-2-1 (rock-sand-cement) mix (by volume). Yeah…that could work. I did the calculations based on 100 pounds of pellets. It came out a little above to the 170-pound goal, and at about the same volume and specific gravity as iron bars. I called it “leadcrete.”


SMALL CRAFT ADVISOR


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