Progress!

Took a little longer than initially planned, but now everything is faired, the balsa is well encapsulated, and only the final top skin of glass and the non skid needs to be applied. 

The West system epoxy works quite well but needs time to cure. Next weekend should see the final touches!

After fairing layer applied

After encapsulating

 

Surgery, Part1

After over a year of pushing this project out, I finally found the guts to replace the soft core in front of the port side chain plates! This quite some project, requiring cutting through the outer skin, digging out the old rotten core and rebuilding everything from scratch. I started with sounding the deck and concluded that the suspect area with at least delamination was along one section in the non-skid that I would need to replace completely. That also required to remove the opening of the wastewater tank (Yikes!).

Suspected area, looking towards the front

After removing wastewater outlet

The hole for the wastewater tank was just drilled through the deck!

So I did that first and found to my surprise that the hole through the deck for the wastewater line was simply drilled through the deck without any epoxy reinforcement or embedding. So that had to be redone as well. Luckily there was no moisture intrusion (yet!) through that hole and the core look dry and sound. Originally I had thought the water intrusion was coming from there, but apparently that was not the case.

After removal of rotten core and top skin 

I started cutting the outer skin off and found plenty of rotten balsa core, of course. Thankfully it extended only half way through the marked area, but I decided to cut the whole thing off anyways to be able to finish it better at a later stage. Otherwise the new non-skid would have probably looked funny attaching to the old one in the middle of a panel. It took me the whole Saturday afternoon chiseling away at the rotten core and removing the old outer skin. It also turned out hat the chain plates were not the source of the water either, even though there is no epoxy barrier around the chan plate openings either on the T34C :-(. That leak looks to come from the refitted bathroom window, which really surprised me as this window is relatively new and hasn't been dripping inside at all. So that one needs to come off too and has to be rebedded I guess.

New balsa core fits nicely!

I had bought some 1/2 inch end grain balsa core from Jamestown Distributors, along with a roll of biaxial fiber glass cloth. Fitting the balsa core is relatively easy as it is segmented in 1x2 inch segments. so cutting it to length with a Dremel tool is no problem. After making sure everything fits I cleaned ervything off and called it a day, covering the whole with some plastic to avoid moisture coming back in during the night.

New varnish!

Cockpit coamings portside aft

Had to take a break for the last 3 weeks due to intensive varnishing work being done on the boat. Looks like new now! The guys did an amazing job and I'm really afraid of touching anything now, everything is shiny and glossy, from the cockpit coamings to the hand rails, toe rails and rub rails. Altogether 140ft of rails plus the cockpit and hatches, that had to be stripped, treated for spots, sanded, coated with 4 layers of varnish and 1 layer of gloss! I'm so glad I didn't have to do it myself. The good news is that in the foreseeable future this won't be necessary to be repeated, as the new coat material just needs a light sanding and 1 layer of re-apply every year. Kudos to the guys from dupeymarine.com for doing a great job!