No Guts, No Glory

Go ahead, drill a nice big hole in the side of your boat.  Is it in the right place? If not, what would you do then?  Are both sides of the boat the same? How do you tell on a rounded trapezoid?
Well there it is.  It did turn out just fine after a couple of hours of timid check and recheck.
Next, what size are should the pilot holes be?  How long should the screws be?  It is balsa cored sandwich.  Therefore the screw should end before the other side of the sandwich.  Answer to what pilot hole size--Google like always. One-eighth inch for a #8 sheet metal screw.

Here's the base mount for the cable clam, a really nifty way to seal out the water.  I had to bore a hole in the gasket block and slit the side afterwords.  Then mounting the wedge gasket looks like this.

   Finally the two nylon sections are screwed together compressing the wedge gasket.

You got to love good engineering!  This is what the final product looks like.