Vinyl headliner

I'm new here as I have developed an obsession about some 80's era Ericson's. Namely, the 32-3, 34-2 and 35-3.

In my local market, they're are a lot of french boats from that period with vynil headliners that are falling apart and that is pretty much the last thing I would want to spend time fixing on my boat. Am I right to assume that this is not an issue with the Ericson's I so admire. I've not yet seen a picture that show a damaged headliner.

Any insight will be appreciated.

Overhead methods

Very Significant difference in the method of attachment of the vinyl.
The French boat builders decided to use an adhesive to hold the headliner up. It was a fast way to attach it and it also let to conform to odd angles and shapes in places like the aft cabins where there were inset places where cockpit moldings met the deck, etc. What with the speed of production this would allow, I imagine that they used a spray adhesive.. and I hope that the workers wore respirators.

Ericson spent more $$ on labor and attached the pre-sewn panel sections with staples. They are hidden behind vinyl cover strips and the edges are usually covered with teak battens. The "mechanical" fastening scheme is good forever or until someone physically damages the vinyl cloth material.
Our '88 boat overhead material mostly looks "like new" except in one place where some idiot made a pen mark on it.

Minor quibble -- I do wish that we had more zippers to access deck hardware; then I would not have pull out 50 staples at a time (under a teak batten that gets unscrewed first) to get at the cabin top. .

I know of Benny owners who have cleaned and re-glued all of their vinyl, and it was tedious and difficult. Time consuming also, especially the removal of the old adhesive.

Regards,
Loren

To add what Loren wrote, the spray adhesive attached headliners that I've come across that have started to fail not in the adhesive, but in the foam backing to the vinyl. So, when you pull the foam down, you end up with this powdery foam mess that is partially attached to the vinyl, but also attached to the somewhat still sticky adhesive on the overhead. I haven't tried to fix this myself, but I've seen the results and it's a lot of painful work to get all that old adhesive and foam remnants off the boat.

As to the Ericson method that Loren described also has it's downsides. The staples are mild steel, so if you have a hidden deck leak, or live in a very humid area, they can rust to the point of the headliner coming apart above you. The zippers Ericson decided to use are also a failing as they are coil type zippers with metal pulls that can corrode.

My boat currently has no vinyl headliner in the v-berth (because of a long hidden leak around the forward hatch that destroyed the staples) and I've cut off all of the zipper pulls throughout the boat (they were all seized when we bought the boat and some fell apart without too much abuse in trying to un-stick them.) There are threads on this forum on how to replace the zipper pulls so that part is relatively easy, but I'm still deciding on how to put the v-berth back together. I'm debating on matching the factory install, or go to a hybrid approach that looks similar to the factory install, but uses heavy duty hook and loop type fasteners to make accessing the deck hardware easier. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Vinyl Vindication

I wish the info on zipper pull replacement (and this site!) had existed in the mid-90's when I had to replace all of the little alum. alloy pulls on every cushion and almost all of the ones in the headliner zipper sections. The plastic coil zipper will likely outlive me, but salt air had corroded many of the pulls to the point where they had to be removed and replaced. Threading on the new pull (about 50 cents @) was tricky, but do-able. There is a technique to it....

Or, we should not have bought a boat that had sat, closed up, for three years.... growing mold. Only way we could afford a quality boat, tho. (All of the foam cushion material had to be thrown away.)

As for our headliner, as long as I can use an old one for a pattern, any experienced upholsterer could make up a new section. If I did not have a pattern I would have make one. To invisibly hold up center sections, the "fin" would have to sewn in where it would be stapled to the wood batten on the underside of the deck. The whole sewn assembly is installed starting from where you staple on that "fin" and stretching fore and aft to the next "fin" or to the edge. You would have several inches of fabric all around to trim off *after* you stretch and staple all the edges.
SS staples would be better, and air-drive them. I have done a lot of re-securing of our headliner edges with a hand stapler, and it's adequate only on a good day.

Like I said above, tho, (presuming no leaks) it's a good procedure and will last a lifetime without the sagging of the quick-n-dirty glue method used by some French boat builders in the same era.

I saved all of the old vinyl to use as templates, but I also need to replace a fair bit of the plywood that Ericson used to staple the the vinyl to.

Apparently the way that Ericson tucked the vinyl into the trim around the hatch caused the leak to put water into the headliner and then it would migrate throughout the v-berth via the felt backing and loose foam layer and eventually evaporate without showing a visible leak. I rebedded all of the usual suspects except for the hatch (it otherwise looked fine) and thought I got the leak until I hauled one very wet winter and spring and they set the boat a bit stern down. This allowed water to hit the leak more efficiently and for the water to migrate to areas that it hadn't before. Once I realized I had a bigger problem it was too late and the headliner staples were toast. When I opened up the headliner to remove it, I had to set buckets to catch all of the water that came pouring out. Not a pretty sight.

Slick470 said:

I saved all of the old vinyl to use as templates, but I also need to replace a fair bit of the plywood that Ericson used to staple the the vinyl to.

Apparently the way that Ericson tucked the vinyl into the trim around the hatch caused the leak to put water into the headliner and then it would migrate throughout the v-berth via the felt backing and loose foam layer and eventually evaporate without showing a visible leak. I rebedded all of the usual suspects except for the hatch (it otherwise looked fine) and thought I got the leak until I hauled one very wet winter and spring and they set the boat a bit stern down. This allowed water to hit the leak more efficiently and for the water to migrate to areas that it hadn't before. Once I realized I had a bigger problem it was too late and the headliner staples were toast. When I opened up the headliner to remove it, I had to set buckets to catch all of the water that came pouring out. Not a pretty sight.

Click to expand...

Lucky for me, when I replaced the old "roll stop" forward hatch with a new one, there had been no leakage. The lens frame was bent (!) when we bought the boat. There was no saving the hatch.
OTOH, I did use that opportunity to epoxy in some better quality wood strips around the opening. Since the fastening holes for the new hatch were slightly different anyway, some epoxy was required no matter what.

Once the old hatch was removed, I could access the staples all the way around that are hidden by the hatch spigot. The finishing out required that all the headliner be restored with new staples, and the new hatch was dropped in last. The big bolts for the aft hinges were installed all the way thru, but with ss barrel nuts on the inside flush with the headliner (for appearance and to protect heads).

Interesting project for a new owner with, at the time, zero experience working on large boats.

Link for more hatch info:
http://www.ericsonyachts.org/infoexchange/showthread.php?4690-Lewmar-deck-hatches&referrerid=28

Through bolting the hatch is also on my list up there. Ericson embedded aluminum plates for the bolts to thread into but after putting it all back together there is more movement there than I would like. I also dug out and replaced and sealed with epoxy the plywood in the deck around the hatch opening as it was mush. Didn't look like there was any effort to seal it after the hatch opening was cut into the deck.

If I had realized the leak was coming from the hatch when I bought the boat, I probably could have saved the original headliner. Oh well.

Thanks for the replies Loren and Andy.
It looks like it's a manageable solution. My current boat is a canadian build with a fiberglass liner.
Will keep the dream alive!

Francis.