Ebb - I completely concur with Conrad's comment! It is amazing to think that these deadlights would only be held against an inrush of a determined sea by (from what I see with mine) approx 1/4" of 40 year old cast aluminum there around the perimeter of those large holes in the house...
and...
Tony - I had already had an idea that I would like to 'shore up these defenses' in some manner, yours and Uhuru's and others method seemed a most practical solution, taking into account strength and time spent doing the job and all.
But...
Having the 'glass' out for a couple of days really made me come to appreciate where I did not before the extra ventilation such can provide. I had thought that it would make little difference in a cabin so small, but was mightily surprised. It is akin to the difference of (w/sealed lights) being in a room of a house, and (when opening) being out on the screened-in porch. More to come on that in a bit.
About this job: Best I can figure, it took me on average probably 3.5 hours per each to pull them, clean them of goo, re-polish the Lexan, and return them into position on the house. As is normal, the first took much longer than did the last, as I refined my "system" for cleaning and scraping of the old goo - that being to most of the work.
What I found works best is to use a single-edged razor blade type paint scraper to slice off as much of the silicone as could be done fairly quickly. Running it across the middle 'flat' area peeled off a good bit quickly, then using it on edge to get into the corners and release the hold of the silicone there, which was a bit more painstaking but faster than other things I tried. Once I had removed as much silicone as possible with this scraper, I used a wire-wheel on my drill to get most of the rest of the stuff off the frame. My last port took probably 1/3 the time it took me on the first, say a tiny bit under 90 minutes to remove the silicone.
I used a high speed grinder with buffer pad to polish the Lexan, it being the key element to my results. 10K RPM's or so, IIRC - it is for automotive finish work, I used to use it to polish up the gloss coat of resin on surfboards, and must be used with care because it _will_ sling your work if too much pressure gets applied.I had some of the recommended "Novus" plastic polishing product, yet found that both normal red-bottle paint rubbing compound and 3M's 'Fiberglass Cleaner and Wax' product worked pretty much as well as the high-dollar, Lexan specific product. Two passes each side with successively finer polish put an almost scratch-free finish on this 10+ year old Lexan in about 20 minutes per pane. Interior UV damage ('crazing') is still visible when seen with light coming straight through, but overall the end result is almost as good as new. See top pic below - that is looking out through 'bronze' tinted Lexan. As the outside had been literally worn down a paper-thickness or two from the years of manual polishing, I swapped the Lexan around, putting the formerly exterior side into the interior now, hoping that might make things slower to deteriorate for a while.
Instead of silicone, I used 3/16" adhesive-backed foam rubber weatherstripping to seal the deadlights. Not sure how well it would hold up at sea, it is mostly a stop-gap measure that does work statically, and can easily be removed if desired in the future. It required that I use longer thru-bolts than the original; while 3/4" would have worked, there were none in stock, so I used 1" instead, and a combination of cup washer and flat washer (see pic) to take up the extra length for a good seal.
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