The boat is being kept in a storage lot that's owned by the community that we live in... cheap and super convenient. I picked up the cover for it from Costco for $80. Normally this goes for $160, but somehow I lucked out an found one that was already opened. I heart Costco.
My wife took these pics of the exterior of the boat today. The hull is actually in really good shape. A few cosmetic issues, but it's never been stored in the water so no gelcoat bubbles. I LOVE the lines of this boat.
Here's the current state of the interior, where all the work has been done.
First of all, we made a mistake by cutting the outdrive hole bigger. We should've just left it as-is. We were originally thinking that we'd just patch the hole with a new piece of marine plywood and we wanted to make sure that we'd removed any rot that might have been caused by the original out drive hole. Later we decide to remove the entire inside of the transom, so now we have extra glass work to do that we wouldn't have had if we'd just decided to remove the transom plywood in the first place... Oh well. Live and learn.
As you can see, both of the inside stringers have been removed, along with the engine mounts. All were rotten. We haven't yet removed the outside stringers. We won't do that until we get the hull onto the boat dollies that we bought. I've heard that removing all of the stringers can lead to the hull twisting if it's not well supported. You can see from the exterior pictures above that the boat is sitting on the trailer kinda cattywompus.
I've been doing a lot of sanding lately on interior sides. I'm removing the nasty gelcoat and some de-laminated glass in preparation for glassing in some 1/8 or 1/4 inch plywood to stiffen the sides a bit. Sanding fiberglass is not fun work. It requires (at least): A crappy angle grinder fitted with a 4-1/2" disk sander (crappy because the glass dust is eventually gonna wreck the grinder), a Tyvek suit (AKA the sweat suit), a respirator, gloves (duct taped to the suit), a hat, hearing protection, and eye protection. Even then my arms are itchy for at least a day after sanding.
I've also removed the glass covering the transom plywood and am working on the transom plywood. The air chisel is my best friend for this job. It's super frustrating though... Marine plywood is like one of those woven placemats that you made in kindergarden. You start de-laminating one piece thinking that the whole thing is going to peal away, only to find that you can only ever remove an inch wide piece at a time. I'll probably have to end up sanding the remaining plywood to get down to bare glass.
Here's my initial list of things that are remaining before we can start building the boat up again:
- Clean up the transom. We need to clean up the jagged glass and sand down the plywood that remains.
- I think that we're going to cut the outside stringers down to allow for lowering the floorboard by about 4" inches. The current floor height only allows for about 2' of freeboard, which comes up to just above my knee. I'd like this to be mid-thigh. The 2x2 that's laying across the outside stringers in the forward looking interior picture above will be the new stringer height.
- There's probably a lot of other stuff that I'm not even aware needs to be cut down, sanded, or cleaned up before we start building up.
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