Suffing Box Packing

[Kevin LeMans]

Reading through the 1981 Owner's Manual, I came across the statement, "All CDY stuffing boxes use 1/4" waxed flax packing. Do not use synthetic or Teflon packing."

I hauled for a bottom job in October and had the yard re-pack the stuffing box. They told me they used teflon packing. Anyone have any recent experience, or know why teflon shouldn't be used?



lemans@gte.net

[Ken Coit]

There are a lot of Cape Dorys using teflon products in the stuffing boxes. Try a search on "teflon" for a long list of messages. I am curious as to what the yard did. The dripless product instructions recommend a round of flax, a round of the teflon product, and then a third round of flax. They supply a teflon goop to soak the flax rounds in. All that is hard to fit into the packing nut, so I wonder what they actually did. I think that the teflon products in the early 80s were not proven or not up to today's standards, so Cape Dory was probably being conservative. Maybe Dave Perry will chime in here to tell us what the current practice at Robinhood is.

Ken Coit
CD/36 Parfait
Raleigh, NC

Reading through the 1981 Owner's Manual, I came across the statement, "All CDY stuffing boxes use 1/4" waxed flax packing. Do not use synthetic or Teflon packing."

I hauled for a bottom job in October and had the yard re-pack the stuffing box. They told me they used teflon packing. Anyone have any recent experience, or know why teflon shouldn't be used?

PPPPparfait@nc.rr.com

[Larry DeMers]

I agree with Ken. We use the Green Goop..Teflon packing. I used two courses of 1/4 in. packing soaked in the goop, and put pure goop between the two courses too. I could not fit a third ring so adopted this method. We did this for the prop shaft and for the rudder shaft..Talk about a SMOOTH rudder now!! Much nicer than the dry flax crud.
It has been in 1 year now, has about 2200 miles on it, and we'll check both this spring (8 weeks!!)befor launching to see how much is left and how it faired.

Cheers,

Larry DeMers
s/v DeLaMer
Cape Dory 30 Lake Superior

Reading through the 1981 Owner's Manual, I came across the statement, "All CDY stuffing boxes use 1/4" waxed flax packing. Do not use synthetic or Teflon packing."

I hauled for a bottom job in October and had the yard re-pack the stuffing box. They told me they used teflon packing. Anyone have any recent experience, or know why teflon shouldn't be used?

demers@sgi.com