New Trampoline

I had thought I could get another year out of our old Trampoline.  But on the Labor Day trip I stepped down hard on it and a tear started along the rope bolt, almost sending my deck show into the Chesapeake Bay.

Old trampoline with tear and temp patch just port of center.

I patched it up as best I could, and back at home quickly started researching where to buy a new one.

Temporary Repair

On the PDQForum I found that many owners had good luck with Sunrise Yacht Products (http://www.multihullnets.com/).  They do custom trampolines and lots of other stuff for boats.

I found the site, filled out their online quote request, and received a quote back from them the same day.  I had a great chat on the phone with Richard about options - which helped me decide what I wanted.  He sent me a drawing of what he had on PDQ's and I took the drawing to the boat to verify the measurements.

Our PDQ was a little different in measurements,as PDQs went through a lot of changes over the years. So I noted those and took some photos, which I uploaded to Picasa so Richard could see them.  Tramp measurements uploaded to Picasa
 
We received the trampoline in about two weeks.

Because is wife is very efficient at all things sewing, and I had a good idea to remove the old trampoline only partially - with the new one laying on top, the install only took about two hours.

Laying new tramp over the old one

The old tramp had rope bolts all round, with adjustments via grommets down the center and along the front.  The new one was much better thought out, with only a single rope bolt in the back, and using sail track slides on the other three sides.

Sail slides replace bolt ropes on three sides

We did a preliminary, but loose run of line down each side.  We purchased the Spectra line that does not stretch, so we gave ourselves a nice advantage in adjustments down the line.  Once we had the lines run, we tightened it across the front (opposite of the rope bolt) then down both sides.  It was about perfect.  We walked on it, ate Chinese food on it watching the sunset and then looked at where we needed adjustments.

Another 20 minutes of adjusting and we were done.

Almost completed trampoline.  

I sent the above photo to Richard with a thank you note.  He looked it over closely and sent back some advice on tying the back corners.

It was nice to have a successful project done.  Only a few more large projects to get done before November 1.