Please critique my 23' CC Rebuild plans

[take a potter]

Thanks for all the input. So Flyingfrizzle, if you were making a bracket with vinyl ester would you use csm between each layer of woven Ie. 1208 or 1708 vs 1700? And more importantly what would you do between layers of plywood in the transom of the bracket?

Over the years I have read a lot of those old threads, I'll go back over them again, unfortunately we lost most of the pictures when photobucket went south.

[flyingfrizzle]

Yea, Photobucket sucks for that deal. They should of grandfathered in pictures uploaded prior to the date of screwing people and holding their uploads for ransom.


Layers between the plys in the transom of an hull or bracket rear-


With VE and poly I normally add two layers of 1708, one facing one way and the second opposite laying the csm layers on the ply and the biax side against each other. If I don't do that I will just add stright csm. I like having the csm on the wood as it will wick the resin out of it. The csm will hold higher percentages of resin and have more to give to the wood long as you wet it out well so it don't leave dry spots after the wood soaks it up. Far as strength this really don't add much to any. Honestly doing like they did at the factory and stapling the sheets together will work just fine. The outer and inner layers are what make the strength. Think of an I beam. I just do it mainly to saturate the wood as much as possible with resin. I also thin the resin with styrene or acetone to get the resin viscosity down so it can soak in easier. I normally buy thin voc resin to start with or infusion resin as you can hand lay it up and it wets out great. Stuff that needs thicker resin I just add cabosil like on verticals that want to run. VE and poly harden fast enough that you can just keep working it to it kicks and then it will stay in place anyhow. So whether or not you do a center layer between the core or not I don't think it matters just have good thick layers sandwiching the core in the middle. It may add some compression strength for you bolts but there other things you can do to aid in that. Using marine ply I would hot coat it with super thin resin with minimal mekP 3-5 times until the wood wont take it any longer. Something else I started doing was fully encapsulating the wood transom cores prior to installing them in the hulls. Lay up the inner side with 75% of the lay up and add a little to the back side and make sure it is wrapped 100% around the core. I cut the ends on angles to make the cloth to lay down and sand the wood so it is a smooth transition for the cloth to lay on. Once I get The entire core sealed up with VE or poly I bond it to the old hull skin with epoxy resin. In the back of a bracket tub you can lay it up wet on wet and use VE for all of it. On older 30 year hulls the epoxy gives you that strong secondary bond to the old glass where as on a bracket transom you can do it in the "green" time window for a primary bond. Now after I have it bonded into the rear of the hull/bracket tub I will add filets around the inside edges and then lay two sheets of 1708 over the inner side lapping it on the hull sides to tie the entire core to the hull. After that plenty of tabbing. You can do this with VE or the epoxy but like mentioned I generally only use epoxy when bonding two cured pieces together as an secondary bond unless there is epoxy there already and that forces you to do epoxy on top of the previous epoxy. By sealing the core 100% prior to installing it there is no to little chance of water getting into to the wood ply unless you drill holes in it which you would want over drill to seal with resin when you did. Less likely for air voids and any gaps can be filled with thickened resin.


Far as the bracket-


Laying up the tub I have used 1708 mainly because you have to build up so much thickness and 1708 builds thickness faster. You could start with Gel coat or primer then 3-5 layers of csm and do all 1700 after that but you would really need to add a lot and pull an vacuum on it to insure the layers get bonded well together. Puncture resistance, over all flex, strength and crushing resistance where the bolts go have to be observed also. I do stingers in the tubs and add core to spots of the swim platform as well. I haven't cored an entire tub but modified a dusky bracket one time that was cored with balsa wood. It would be in your favor to make the bracket light but that's hard to do with fiberglass. I have built them from aluminum also and they are lighter for sure. Maybe some others with bracket experience will chime in as I would like to know what they have done and what works far as lay up thickness without flexing. I tend to over build stuff lol.