Upgrading the forward handrail lifeline

The forward handrail on Third Wave uses lifeline which is essentially vinyl covered 304 stainless steel wire.  While the existing lifeline was in incredibly good shape for something installed back in 1973, the whole system needed a good cleaning and some notable upgrades in order to meet our standards.

The pictures below shows the state of the lifeline when we bought the boat.  The top rail caps were made of chrome plated brass and the chrome was in bad shape leaving the whole thing looking dingy.  The middle lifeline went through a sleeved hole. The lifelines were droopy and used cheap cable clamps on either end.  There was no good way to tension the lines.  Also, the lifeline itself was very thin.  Because of the thin line and the sagging installation of it, the line would grab your jeans when you tried to use it to slide along the walkway next to the saloon.

In order to address these issues, we removed the handrail uprights from the boat and then used rubbing compound and a wool polishing bonnet on a heavy duty buffing machine to shine up the old stainless upright posts.  These posts are not the same size as modern stainless due to having thicker walls back in the 1970s. These uprights are much stronger than standard 7/8" marine stainless tube today.  In any case the heavy grit polishing compound not only took off grease and dirt but also old varnish.  In addition, it removed surface scratches from the metal bringing them back to like new appearance.
The lifeline caps could not be reasonably salvaged.  Not only is the cost of re-chroming stuff simply astronomical, the result would still be chrome plated brass and that does not hold up well in saltwater.  So for about $8 each we were able to purchase new caps made by sea dog.  These are made for modern 7/8" stainless tube and they fit a tad loose on the old 1970s railing, but not loose enough to be a problem.  In contrast, the modern day 1" fittings need to be reamed out to 1-1/16" before they will go onto the old school 1" tube (which actually has an OD of 1-3/64).  We used Seadog 316 stainless hardware for the end tie points that you see in the picture above right.  Instead of cable clamps as you see in the picture above, we used Swageless terminals (jaw type on one end and loop type on the other) for a clean, high end appearance.  There are many options for this online but we chose those made by Tecnicable out of the UK.  We purchased new vinyl coated wire rope from Downwind marine.  The original stuff was 1/8" stainless wire coated in vinyl to give an overall thickness of about 3/16.  The new stuff is 3/16 stainless wire that is coated to give an overall thickness of 5/16.  We think that the thicker wire which is pulled taut using our new 4mm stainless turnbuckles will create a stronger, safer lifeline system.





While the top caps pretty much handled the prep for installation of the top wire, the middle wire was thicker than the original wire and that meant that the sleeved holes had to be drilled out and re sleeved.  We made a short video to describe the process used to do that which you can watch here.

Pictures of the final installation will be added when available.