Rebedding the Opening Port Lights

We had to rebed all of our port lights because every single one was leaking, understandable after 46 years. After removing and restoring each port (more on that here), we replaced the old seals with household weather stripping. A rubber seal would probably be better, but we couldn't find exactly what we needed so weather stripping is the temporary fix (it's still working great after 9 months though!).

We decided to use butyl tape as our bedding compound due to the fact that it has a 30+ year service life and we'd read a great post about it on Sundowner Sails Again that convinced us. For the port in the photo below, we just used butly from Napa Auto Parts (used for windshields), but it was a lot harder to work with. The link to the really good butyl mentioned on Sundowner's page is here. We used it for all the other ports and various rebedding projects and it worked waaaaay better!

On the exterior, we used Lifeseal to waterproof around the bolt holes and secure the outer ring of the port.

We secured the outer ring of the port light with a clamp so that we could get the bolts back in (sorry no photo). Remember to mark which bolt goes in which hole because ours apparently had specific spots. Our coach roof and headliner varied greatly in thickness and each bolt was trimmed accordingly which matters when you have a cap nut on the end. We realized this after the fact and had to figure out, by trial and error, where each one went!

Note the blue tape that was holding plastic on while the port was removed. We made the mistake of buying the cheap painters tape and not 3M - big mistake. ALWAYS buy 3M in the future. The crappy stuff won't stick when you need it to and won't come off when you want it to...

 The finished product all shiny and watertight!