My boat has a soft spot on the bow on the starboard side. This usually means one of two things: the fiberglass is delaminated from the coring or the core is wet and rotted as well which causes delamination. It's basically, good news all around. Boat topsides are always constructed with coring which is a layer of fiberglass, a layer of end grain balsa or synthetic product and another layer of fiberglass. This saves a lot of weight in areas where the boat doesnt need to be extremely strong.
Looking at the spot last weekend, it seemed to be smaller than I had remembered it, which i was thrilled about. You could push in or hear the difference in sound with a hammer in a roughly 24x18 section of the bow and there is spiderweb cracking of the gel coat in the area. I knew it would be wet a bit outside the obvious area so I marked a section initially about 24x24 and started cutting with my bosch oscillating tool. I wrested with the skin for a bit to get it pried up, dry areas are still bonded to it, and found the wood was wet further outside the area.
Before cutting more i drilled holes until i found what i thought was dry wood. Another 24x24" ish section cut out and skin peeled off. Wood still wet further up and below. Fuck. All said and done i have a section just over 7' long and 3' wide cut off.
Heres the fun stuff so far:
After the first two cuts. The final cut goes to within 8-10" of the windshield and another foot or so toward the bow. the skin is flipped upside down to the right of the hole there.
got rot? You can see how wet the wood is, the dry stuff is really light colored.
and this is what im dealing with even after i got done cutting. Luckily there are some fiberglass ribs in the structure tying the inner and outer pieces together when they were molded. I dug out the wet stuff about an inch back from where its being poked and got to solid glass.
https://instagram.com/p/BSpboR8lsVy/
Looking at the spot last weekend, it seemed to be smaller than I had remembered it, which i was thrilled about. You could push in or hear the difference in sound with a hammer in a roughly 24x18 section of the bow and there is spiderweb cracking of the gel coat in the area. I knew it would be wet a bit outside the obvious area so I marked a section initially about 24x24 and started cutting with my bosch oscillating tool. I wrested with the skin for a bit to get it pried up, dry areas are still bonded to it, and found the wood was wet further outside the area.
Before cutting more i drilled holes until i found what i thought was dry wood. Another 24x24" ish section cut out and skin peeled off. Wood still wet further up and below. Fuck. All said and done i have a section just over 7' long and 3' wide cut off.
Heres the fun stuff so far:
After the first two cuts. The final cut goes to within 8-10" of the windshield and another foot or so toward the bow. the skin is flipped upside down to the right of the hole there.
got rot? You can see how wet the wood is, the dry stuff is really light colored.
and this is what im dealing with even after i got done cutting. Luckily there are some fiberglass ribs in the structure tying the inner and outer pieces together when they were molded. I dug out the wet stuff about an inch back from where its being poked and got to solid glass.
https://instagram.com/p/BSpboR8lsVy/