First of all, welcome back Tom. Did you cut your vacation short? I thought you were off for two weeks. Just couldn't stay away, Huh?
Now for my problem. I was down the keys two weeks ago, while riding along my starboard tab decided to pull loose from the transom. The tab stayed attached to the ram and 3 of the screws attaching the hinge plates pulled out of the transom but stayed attached to the plates. The fourth (outermost) screw loosened considerably but stayed in the transom, holding the plates and screws on the boat. I got in the water and removed the tab from the ram and the hinge and remaining screw from the transom, so I could get back to shore.
When I pulled the boat out, I noticed that all four holes, aside from being slightly enlarged, were nice and clean, without a trace of any type of caulking present. I put these tabs on using 5200 back in Dec. and found in doing so that I had water in the transom. I brought the boat back to Angler and they removed the tabs to see if they could get water to leak from those holes. They supposedly found the problem and reinstalled my tabs. I'm willing to bet that they didn't use 5200, or anything else for that matter, to seal the holes. Another thing is, on all four screws the heads are bent from the shafts, so I imagine these were working their way out for a while.
To end this very long post (sorry) what I did was let the boat sit for a couple of days and then used a shop vac and hair dryer to get as much water out of the composite transom as possible, and the then reinstalled the hinge plates with #14 screws and a ton of 5200. My question is - will this be OK or should I have done something different?
Oops, looks like Tom isn't back yet. Tabman II is posting as Tabman.
[This message was edited by MIKE F on 07-09-03 at 01:02 PM.]
Trim Tab pulled out of transom!! 
