The prospect of removing fastenings in order to perform a boat repair is the proverbial box of chocolates—you never know what you’ll find. Will the screw be frozen into place? Will the head crumble into pink dust and disintegrate, creating the need for drilling and using an EZ-Out screw extractor? But before you get to that stage, you have to get to the screw. Most painted hulls will have the counterbored screw holes filled with some sort of surfacing compound or petrified putty. This stuff can (usually) be successfully extricated by way of cautious work with an ice pick or small chisel and mallet. The result can be a bit ragged, but not problematic, since the resulting cavity will be filled with putty again.
But what if the job involves removing bunged fastenings from a cherished, varnished, and expensive mahogany hull so that you can replace a few frames? Picking away at a batch of bungs with a probe can be a slow and meticulous business, and there is no guarantee that you’ll preserve the sharp edges of the original counterbore. Dinging those edges can endanger the look of the new finish when it goes on over the repair bungs. Hervey Garrett Smith recognized this in Boat Carpentry, his 1955 classic tome on repair.
Anne Bryant
As the cutter gets close to the fastening below, both the tip bevel of the tiny blades and the spring mechanism of the pilot pin prevent damage that might make the fastening difficult to remove.
Smith admonished his readers not to peck at the bungs “like a termite.” Instead, he suggests, “Cut the head off a steel wood screw, No. 12 or No. 14, and put the screw in the chuck of your hand brace. Center it carefully in the bung and screw it SLOWLY. When the point of the screw fetches up on the head of the fastening (below), the bung will be eased right out!” Maybe. But that was before everyone started cementing things in place with epoxy, and attacking the finished planking on a classic Chris-Craft with Smith’s brace-mounted mini-auger could damage the surrounding planking. Surely there must be an easier way.