I spent the weekend suited up and grinding in the engine compartment and fuel tank compartment. Whoo hoo! The deck under the fuel tanks was made of a piece of half inch plywood laminated only on the top and tabbed to the stringers on both sides. I tore it out with a crowbar when I first started on the boat, and this weekend I ground the remains of the tabbing off the top of the stringers to clean them up for a new tank deck.
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There was a damp spot in the transom plywood on the port side under the exhaust hole. The exhaust tube was sealed well, so I suspected there might be exposed plywood concealed behind the stringers. I cut them back a couple inches and both stringers on the port side had exposed plywood showing. The inner laminate on the transom is not very thick, probably a single layer of 1708 biaxial. I ground it off the area of damp plywood to give it some exposure to air that should allow it to dry. The plywood is sound, so if I can get a good moisture meter reading on it I'll leave it in place and laminate a new skin over it. After that, I'm going to build up the whole inner transom to at least 3/16" of laminate and rebuild the aft end of the stringers and tab them in. Here's the port side:
In the picture, It's kind of hard to see where the plywood is exposed. There was a gap where the step was cut in the plywood that left the bottom edge exposed. You can see in the following picture that they filled this gap on the starboard side.
And the starboard side was dry. The engine compartment, cleaned up and ready for a little glass work:
That's all I got done over the weekend, but I went to work sanding the primer off the hull sides the past two evenings:
The gelcoat is in better shape than I expected. I am entertaining the delusion that if I can wet sand it to a uniform color, I may just hit it with some Poly Glow and postpone painting it until my kids (one starting college, the other getting married) aren't causing serious leaks in my cash flow. Regardless, I'll at least need to paint the top cap and cockpit.
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It gets better after the sanding and grinding is done, right?
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Not really...there is fairing and more sanding [img]/forum/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]
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Yeah, I kinda expected that, Terry. Hopefully the worst of the fairing will be the transom. I need to grind out some spider cracked gelcoat and fair it back. Sanding the top cap will probably be the toughest prep work. There's lots of square footage, but mostly in long narrow strips that won't allow use of the RO sander.
Dave