1986 Tracker Seacraft 20 budget rebuild

[Jared]

Haven’t posted in a while, a Lot has been going on keeping me busy with work/family/fishing but have been making a little progress on the boat. The floor is pretty far along, just need a little more glass work on the starboard side and then some final fairing. Since the last update on the floor:

-glued the meranti ply down using epoxy thickened with cabosil. The wood I removed was rotten under the lip toward the gas tank opening, I was able to chisel out all the rotten spots and cut a piece of ply to fit in between the 2 skins. I didn’t want a straight line of a joint in that spot on the deck, although in hindsight I don’t think it mattered anyway so I cut that sawtooth pattern into the joint. It was late and made me feel better.

-after prepping and prefitting the top skin a few times I had a low spot on the ends. I built it up with a couple layers of biax now to save some fairing later.

-top skin glued down with more thickened epoxy. It was hot and had to mix a lot of resin, had to call in reinforcements to make sure I could get everything how I wanted it before any resin started to kick.

-seam between glued down skin and deck ground out a couple inches each way and to put a couple layers of 10 oz plain weave.

-port side filled crack all the way around top skin bonded back on with thickened resin. This will be sanded smooth before 2 plies of glass goes down. Starboard side has ply glued down and cured, now top skin curing.

-this is where I left it tonight. The port side has the 2 layers of 10 oz plain weave on, needs a bit of fairing. The starboard side is sanded and ready for the fiberglass.

[Jared]

Got the starboard side fiberglass laid down, now hoping to pull the boat to work sometime soon. My compressor is too small to run a 16” board sander I have, need the bigger one at work to do a quick job of fairing and sanding the floor repairs.

In the meantime, made a gas tank. This one is just under 52 gallons, made from 1/8” 5052 aluminum. Pressure tested ok, now working on getting the fiberglass slats I made earlier glassed in at the correct height underneath the tank to support it. The nice part about shortening the tank a bit lengthwise and pushing it forward for weight is now all the space behind it will be a new storage compartment eventually.

I want to either coal tar epoxy the tank before the final installation or some other kind of corrosion preventative measure, any ideas? The only DIY coal tar epoxy materials I could find online looked like it was way more material that I need, I didn’t want to waste the extra money. Might try to find a local company to coat it.