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A blog about SCAMP (Small Craft Advisor Magazine Project) boats. Covering the build, sailing the boat and the scamp community that has formed around this little portly boat.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Thoughts on flipping a scamp

I was thinking about how to flip over a scamp.
On the message boards (and Craig's site, which has good pictures), people rig up dual straps with cinches from the ceiling and it looks complicated and hard to turn. It seems to me that scamps are relatively light. A bit too much for a single person to lift and turn, but not that hard for 2-3 people if they have control.

By tying a rope to the boweye and running that up to a block (or another eye bolt) in the ceiling, one person could lift the bow quite easily.
A second person would stabilize the stern as the bow went up. Put a mover's dolly under the stern for safety.
When the bow was far enough up so that the cabin will clear the ground, the stern holder could lift and flip the boat over just with a few hand movements.

A third person on one side could help guide the boat as she turned.

Has anyone tried this method? It puts a lot of weight on that boweye, but the 3/8" bronze one that I have should handle the weight fine. (McMaster says that steel 3/8" eye bolts can hold 1300 lbs for lifting.)

If I'm wrong or if there is already a good tutorial on the message boards please send a link. I couldn't find it.

2 comments:

  1. This should work fine, but, I'm leery of that weight on the boweye. Noddy has the same or similar one to yours, I think, but the whole bow transom etc bulges a bit, when I winch her up the trailer if she gets hung up.

    I really like your proposed scheme though and think with the addition of a line through the cutouts on the cabin side forward extensions, and also attached to the lifting line to the boweye line, so the load was fairly evenly distributed, I'd have no worries at all.

    Every time I've flipped Noddy, I've had 4 guys plus me as the spotter and saw-horse positioner; we lifted her, pulled the jig out, turned her over, and set her on the horses :-) At least once, when doing it on another SCAMP, we had a marginal lifting crew and had to set her on the side gunnels on a prepositioned set of lounge chair cushions while lifters repositioned their grips and caught their breath.

    Go for it!

    Simeon

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  2. I used two straps anchored to the ceiling, and found that went pretty smoothly. A couple safety points with that method are:
    1) link the two straps with a rope so the front one doesn't slip off the curvy end of the boat
    2) have one person support the boat while letting tension off the straps, as they don't ratchet out, but release all at once

    I did like this method because you could pause and take stock at any point, without someone bearing the weight of the boat.

    Good luck, and post phots if you can. -- Dave

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