Slow Going

Life has been pretty busy the past few weeks so I haven't gotten anything done (on the boat anyway). About the only thing I have had time to do was to order sandpaper and tyvek suits with hoods to keep the itchy fiberglass dust at bay.

Fortunately I had a few hours to spend today so I got back to the forward cabin top. I had finished up a few weeks back by identifying some of the bad areas (or so I thought). As it turned out, not all were bad. In fact only 2 areas actually had water in the core, but a few of the others I had to pull the core out anyway because when I pulled up the top skin, it yanked half of the core out with it.

I am pretty happy with the lack of work I need to do in this area. I know there will be lots more to do and any time I can save is a good thing.

While I was cutting out the area around the starboard hatch hinge, I kept finding more wet core, so I kept cutting out a larger area to find the extent of the water infiltration. I eventually butted up against the solid core under the mast step that runs the width of the cabin top. It turns out that the water was mostly coming from a wiring chase that straddles the solid deck and the cored area. Two of the pictures show the exposed solid core. It was cool to see what I had sounded and drilled and know for certain that it was exactly what I had thought it was. It's also good to know that I won't have to deal with recoring the step or rebuilding the deck beam. Now I know for certain that these areas are solid (I had previously inspected the deck beam and found that it is oak with a 1/4" steel box beam for added support. I don't know if this is original or not.

Next up is to feather the edges of the mess I have created and get down to Mertons in Springfield to pick up epoxy and core materials. I hope to get down to Springfield in a week or two and then get ready for the 'week of doom' (I'm taking a week off work to focus on the boat sometime in April).

Decisions, Decisions

After bracing up the main cabin last week I was able to remove the rest of the top without worrying about falling through or distorting the curve of the cabintop. The big surprise was that the entire port side was in great shape... perfect, so I really didn't need to remove it. Yet the starboard side was a wet rotten mess and I dug it all out (and under the remaining deck skin).  It was really difficult to remove the top skin and now that I have I can see that somebody had taken the time to fill all the through deck screw holes with epoxy and then retapped for the screws and bolts (See second picture below). The same can't be said for the starboard side and is exactly why that area is rotten.

Because the port section of core is perfectly good and pulling it up would be a real pain, I think I am going to leave it in place but enlarge the areas of the through deck screws to make room for a plug of solid glass layup (See first picture below).   Armed with the new Dremel Multimax I was able to easily cut out the squares I needed around some of the existing through deck holes.  I'll finish up the rest of them this week.  I had heard mixed reviews about the Multimax but given that the Fein was completely out of the question (way to costly), I decided to go for it.  So far it works great and I haven't had any of the issues that I had read about in some of the reviews online.

I hope this won't be a mistake leaving this part of the core in place (I have several opinions for doing either), but I guess I'll find out.  I don't think that I will find alot of good core on other areas of the boat, so I don't believe this is a decision I'll have to make very often.   Next week I'll be putting more bracing in for the forward cabintop and start beveling the edges of the cuts for tabbing in the new skin when the time comes.