In the interest of time, I think I am going to buy a premade nidacore panel from LBI composites for a tank deck. Some 10mm/ 3/8" nidacore with 18oz woven roving. I am running out of time to lay up more panels. Plus I want to try this stuff.

I also gritblasted an area for a forward bulkhead. The place I can reach thru the false bottoms in the cubbys (binnacles?) under the bunks is a bit farther forward than I would like, but it is better than nothing. It might be 30" aft of the next bulkhead forward near the anchor locker, and a solid 60 inches forward of the cockpit (forward of tank compartment) bulkhead. If I had all summer for a rehab, I would approach this differently, but I want to use the boat, so this is the approach I will take.

I think this boat might have had the stringers re-tabbed or it was just pretty well done. I am not sure. But stringer tabbing looks good. Deck and bulkhead, not as much.

Of note: grey bilge paint disappears when you hit it with a sandblaster. Gelcoat doesn't. So I think the bilge will get more gelcoat. Or at least the tank deck surfaces.

A real grind
 

This weekend I did a lot of grinding. And sand blasting. And vacuuming. And solvent wiping. I did finally get the trapezoidal spacers trimmed and installed for the fuel tank hold forward bulkhead.

You can see the remnants of my vinylester patch-up from last year.

Of note: My main stringers were maybe 2 layers of heavy woven roving. Not super heavy. I patched my nick in the port stringer with vinylester and 4 layers of 17 oz biax in alternating orientations. The bukhead goes over top, so I wasn't going to skimp on a really hard to inspect spot.

And the plywood under the cockpit sole? Not even really glassed in. I am not impressed. Not sure that's original or not. I tried to seal it with neat vinylester while I was installing the biax.

This was a lot of work. But 8 months ago, this hold was a mushroom farm. http://www.classicseacraft.com/commu...2&postcount=18

The CF deck stiffener before I trim it back to ~1" flanges. It was a little dry so the peel ply print-thru is incomplete. But I only need 5 feet out of a 6 foot piece. It is an ugly under deck part. It will look better when I trim it, honest! But it rings like a bell when you tap it. :D

And the balsa core in the main deck. In a rough cut tank inspection hatch that I inherited.

Got the bulkhead in today. I have some resin burns from where it snuck around my moon suit when I was tabbing it in.

I have about 4 layers of 17 oz biax tabbing by the keelson. It is hard to get good wrap over the keelson, so there were a lot of smaller pieces. The balance got a layer of 1708 DBM and a layer of biax. Scantling rules call for a minimum of 22 oz, so that is covered.

I was running out of light and my lantern died. It looked good until I hit it with peel ply. At which point it wanted to stick to my gloves more than wet cloth. We will see if anything lifted.

The bulkhead is ~1" thick. A 3/4" core and just under 1/8" skins. It is far stiffer than 1" ply. And light, too.

I am *SO* glad to be done with under deck work. :eek:

The deck stiffener was a lot easier to trim than the bulkhead. I actually destroyed a carbide 5-1/2" blade. Not sure how, but it lost all the teeth. Thankfully there was a spare kicking around.

Ordered some 10mm nidacore panels with glass skins from LBI today for the tank deck and the interior where the original ply has rotted away.

Here is a section of the deck "hat section" stiffener from when I was trimming to length. Black hats, apparently.

Looking good

Nidacore panels from LBI showed up with 18 oz 0-90 woven roving. Weird white colored resin for the glass. I need to ask what it is, exactly.

The vinyl-ester resin I use turns white like this when cured. It starts out a redish bay brown color and once it starts to kick it turns whitish and once fully cured it is very white like what you have here. I read on the web about it before I bought mine and it is use for different reasons. One that I like is that it covers easy and you can paint over it with out much bleed threw of color. Also the under side of hatches and such may not even need to be coated at all if you are good with the look of the white. Another good thing about this type of resin is that it dose not shrink at all like most resins. It stays the same size or will actually will grow slightly. This helps retain shape better and you get less warping. It is mainly used for infusion injection molding but I have been laying it up by hand and what I have is thin enough you can easily vacuum bag with it. I was unsure about it at first but after using 50 gallons of it I like it.

Here is the resin fully wet:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/...ps68fc1266.jpg

In this picture you can see it start to turn white first at the edges where it is thicker and kicks off faster:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/...psc9b25502.jpg

In this picture it is almost cured white no paint just bare resin:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/...psfa86137b.jpg

This is the same lay up as the first picture but now cured out but still just bare resin:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6c5c4f95.jpg

resin oddity
 

Weird. Mine starts red-brown, then stirring in the MEKP, it goes red-green. Brushing it on it still has this translucent red-green-pink hue. It cures sort of yellowpink, like ginger root. But it is in no way white or opaque.

I believe I have Vipel F010-TBN-28 with a cobalt (napthenate) accelerator for room temp cure.

The elongation is 6.2% :D

Don't use a carbide blade for cutting glass laminate, use one of these on your side grinder:

http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pro...c27441_300.jpg

Slices through it like a knife through warm butter. Doesn't have to be Dewalt brand. They're about 3 bucks at Home Depot or Lowes.

One of these with the type blade Dave mentions above is magic!!!

http://www.dremel.com/en-us/Tools/Pa...0#.U4Cha_ldVAU

Thanks for the tip!

I don't have a side grinder. Yet!

Installed the carbon deck stiffener today. Mixed up some VE/glass microbaloon/ milled fiber/ fumed silica and catalyzed at just under 2%. Installed it with 3 car jacks. One in the middle, one each end. It kicked nicely. We will see how it looks tomorrow. I might actually have put a little crown in the deck if I am lucky.

The resin I use is also an AOC product, It is a Hydropel High Performance Vinyl-Ester infusion resin. I like the infusion resin because of the low viscosity. 1708 lays up better with a thin resin to get a good fast absorption plus I was planning on doing some vacuum bagging also is why I went with a thinner viscosity. I cant find the MSDS but here is a link to a close version to what I have: (my product number is slightly different but it is about the same resin)

http://www.aoc-resins.com/web/site/p.../500/C145/C18/

PS. Get the side grinder, I use that mostly cutting fiberglass with the supper thin metal blade or either a diamond coated tile/concrete blade. The cut very well and last a good while too.

The carbon deck stiffener works great. You can just barely tell the difference between stiffener and stiffener held in place by 3 scissor jacks, on stringers and keelson. I am very happy. And with a 1" carbon part, the tank fits. It didn't with a 2x4 held in with shoddy woven roving.

I tabbed in the forward side of the forward tank bulkhead today with 2 layers of 1708DBM in vinylester. And fit the trapezoidal spacers for the tank-engine compartment bulkhead. I glued them down with 1/32" milled fibers, glass micro balloons and fumed silica in vinylester.

The tank deck goes in well for a dry fit and the Moeler FT-5056-R1 tank fits nicely. I will foam it all in place.

I still have to patch the hole for the old thru-hull for the head water intake, install a midships/ cockpit drain bilge system, fit the rear bulkhead, patch the strip from the fuel tank hatch to engine cowl, change the raw water impeller, plumb and wire the tank and splash to check for leaks. Before the end of June.

In addition to a new aft bulkhead, I need to reconstruct the aft side fuel tank hatch mounting lip. The hinges tore up the deck, and I think that *esteemed* purveyor of engines in Worcester hacked off the aft lip of the fuel tank hatch mounting surface during installation of two fuel tanks. So after I bond in a bulkhead, I will bond in a piece of 1-1/4" G-10 square tube to create a mounting surface, then glass over that. I am using the off cut from the reation of the deck stiffener to help mount the G10 tube. That is the 1" x 45 degree H80 divinycel fillet piece.

Then I will fix the deck adjacent to the engine cover...

Well, the 25 won't be going on vacation this year. I ran out of time. The bulkheads are in. The aft most one looks nice. The lip on the fuel tank hatch has been recreated. But that is where it will stop for this month. I will put the fancy fish finder on the 20 and use that for now so I can install tanks and such in less of a rush later this summer.

I hope to hit the northern MA to southern ME cost later this year with the 25. Maybe for the tuna bite.

A shot of the aft bulkhead glassed in. And the G10 tube to recreate the fuel tank hatch opening lip. And the nidacore/glass tank deck.

This was after a sprint to get it done on a Sunday night. So there is PVA and excess putty everywhere. But with a carbon deck stiffener, a foam core tank hatch and the G10 tube as a tank hatch lip, now I can jump on the tank hatch and nothing moves, which is a HUGE improvement. I think 2015 will be the year for resurfacing the deck.

Glassed in the hole for the water pickup for the head and foamed in the void between the hull and the tank deck. I used PEX extruded polyethylene forced hot water tube to connect the limber holes. I probably only got 3 cubic feet of foam down there.

I have 10 layers of 1708 over the hole. 5 inside, 5 out done in wet on wet vinylester. I had to do the outside in 4 different batches, as I was laying the 1708 on upside-down.

That spot lines up pretty squarely with a bunk when loading, so I am glad to get of an old crusty bronze through hull there.

Looks like my circles of glass might not be as concentric as I wanted. And I have some grinding to do, but between bottom paint, peel ply and PVA, it shouldn't be terrible. Thankfully I haven't had to do any cosmetic stuff yet this year.

Looks pretty concentric to me in that last shot! I think the camera/deadrise angle in that first pic made it look worse than it really is!

So I decided to foam in the tank deck, but not glass it in. It doesn't seem worth the effort. It is stuck down solidly with the foam, resting on the keelson. I plumbed two 3/4 PEX tube from the fore and aft tank compartment bulkheads. I recommend it. It can be bent to conform to the hull easily.

At any rate, I will do what moeller says and put foam padding between the tank and where it rests. But I will just foam that in under it. So it would be tank- 3/8" foam sheet- 2-4" floatation foam- hull/ stringers.

The tank is just under the (main) deck. I am not 100% sure how (if) to restrain it that way. I can put some foam in a bag and squeeze it between the tank top and the deck? Straps would be really tough to do, I think.

Any thoughts?

After some guide coat and sanding, the patch is okay enough to gelcoat for something that is below waterline and under antifouling paint. If I long board the gel coat, I don't think you would be able to tell it is there. There are a few voids at the layer overlaps, but I guess that will happen with upside down glassing. The gel coat filled them nicely- they were quite shallow.

So the boat was in storage from September 2014 to May 2017.

I winterized it per the Mercruiser manual for a heat exchanger equipped 350 MAG MPI back then, and it started after about 2 seconds of cranking today. Phew.

So now I need to re-winterize it. This year was mostly completion of the fuel tank area and fixing some bilge plumbing, and some power washing.

I have a few questions:

The engine is a 2004, with a new lower unit circa 2007. I think it has been in fresh water once since 2007, and never in salt water since then. I winterized the seawater side with polyethylene glycol in 2014.

It has the closed cooling for the engine. But I am concerned about the rubber parts for the exhaust and the I/O bellows. How long do those rubber parts and the manifolds last? I don't want to hydrolock something that runs so well.

That looks like a very high quality repair. Better than some "professional" repairs we have come across. Nice work :)

Thanks! I learned from the best! This forum has given me excellent guidance for repairs. It's really amazing the quality of the help you get here.

The engine still runs so next season is finishing the tank deck, a little cleanup, maybe new I/O bellows, and running it some.

i/o bellows over the drive shaft, replace every couple of years to be safe, you are way overdue. If its like a Volvo, the exhaust bellows have holes in them, no dangerous buildup of ice. The other rubber hose in the exhaust system should be very thick and should be fine. Basicly, if its thin rubber, replace it

Winterizing tip- buyer beware
 

I got burned by West Marine this week. Well not really but I bought marine and RV antifreeze from them. The stuff by the door was $2.99 a gallon. That seemed good. But it isn't safe for winterizing engines as it has no propylene glycol. Just ethanol. The text saying it isn't safe for engines is in fine print. I noticed AFTER I used it and had to do it over with the good stuff.

So it goes back in shrink wrap tomorrow. Next year it will get tanks and bellows and a forward mini bulkhead. And a slip, I hope!

I am busy stripping the teak(?) louvered door. Any suggestions on finish? It had a lot of what might have been spar varnish on it. I have teak oil but not sure that's what I want.

My 25 has wonderful looking varnish on the door and interior teak, put on by the previous owner, must be at least 10 years ago. Very durable stuff; I treat it roughly. He said it was an Epiphanes varnish product, but I don't know which one, lots and lots of coats, probably 10.

That's the one. I used epiphanes from west marine. put 8 coats on 5 years ago. Going to be touching up a few spots, but, all in all, it still looks great.

I vote for Cetol - first the stain, then the gloss topcoat. Holds up well.

I`ll never use varnish again.

I recently used Allwood from Awlgrip.
Simply amazing.
Spot repairable.
Hard yet flexible.
Flows out beautifully.
4-5 coats per day.
Has a sealer tint coat which makes the grain pop like
tung oil in varnish.

10 coats brushed on before blocking.
14 coats total followed with 4 coats of UPOL automotive
flexible bumper clear.

Jeez louise! That uh, should do it.
:eek:

Hasn`t been cut and polished yet.

The secret is in his name! GO FAST SANDing MAN.

Hahaha.

Finally logged back on. GFS, might you have a photo of your project? I have some beautiful mahogany downstairs waiting to be two part, two coats MAS epoxy, then 10 coats of Spar varnish. This friggin project has been on hold for four years, and the last (1982 BW 15 Sport) came out like living room furniture, all 5/4”, more or less stock interior replacement. But that was 2004.

Now I’m onto an identical 1988 and I’d love a product that can be applied more than one coat per day. Minor block sanding/brass wool, and wiped with a tack cloth between coats? Thanks.

No offense to OP.

Vezo, Part II

I am upset with photobucket, but have some on my phone.

The entire process is a bit different as their chemists freaked when I mentioned
wiping with alcohol and tack rags. They only wanted dust blown off before their
primer/tint coats.

Sorry OP.

Hopefully the last snow was yesterday. It's back in the yard and the tank goes in soon.