[chriselk]

We removed the cap and flipped it over.

The cap had a huge cleat at the bow with a teak block backing. Most of the balsa had rotted in the bow and the rot on the sides was localized by the holes in the cap-naturally. We ground everything out. See first picture-I had a 24 grit disc from the big grinder disintegrate at speed and it went into my knee. I should have bought the variable speed grinder-thats too fast for a disc.

That meant removal of all of the balsa in the second half (stern) of the cap and several areas forward.

To rebuild the cap, we put half inch Coosa 20 in the bow area. We put glass and cabo under then glassed on top (17 oz always). We reinforced the bow areas since we are putting a windless up there. We used foam for small areas of rot that were isolated in the middle of a field of balsa. In the stern areas we used coosa and we filled all holes save on rod holder on each side since I liked that position and wanted to save it. Now we have coosa whereever we want to put a rod holder or cleat. For rod holder backing plates we are using some pieces of 3/16 glass from Parker boats (scrap they give away-useful in some places for backing). I apologize for not getting finished pictures of the upside down position of the cap. Basically we roughed it in, glass, faired and put topcoat on it. Looks very good for underside of a cap. Yes we are anal retentive sometimes.

I crawled under the cap and shot a couple of pictures to show the finished product. Not great pics sorry.

The first picture is forward. You can see we finished this before we put the cap back on. Who wants to sand upside down?

The second picture is a recent reinforcement of the corners of the transom under the cap. If you recall, we cut the cap just forward and we wanted to beef that area up. Plus a cleat and a rod holder go in the corners. We put in a piece of coosa to level out the previous coosa and to bring it to the corner (about a foot, 4 inches wide). Now that it was flush, we glued in a 20 inch piece of coosa to overlap and to tie it all together-this is the long gray board seen in the picture. We have not glassed it yet. We are not looking forward to glassing upside down, but it has to be done.