On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:08:11 -0800 (PST), wrote:

I ground off the section of fiberglass below the outdrive down. And
feathered it out a bit. The plywood is a bit punky but still
resembles plywood. I dug out a couple spots that were softer that the
rest of the area. It's fairly dry since it has been 3 or 4 months
with the boat in the garage but I've got a fan blowing on it right
now.

http://home.earthlink.net/~jamesgangnc/cutaway.jpg

I'm going to leave the fan on it for a few days just to dry any
residual dampness. Then I'll soak the exposed wood with an alcohol/
epoxy mix. Follow up with some filler/epoxy to build the plywood back
out to the original level. Then lay 4 or 5 layers of glass/epoxy on
top of that.

Oh man - does that look familiar. It's almost exactly what happened
with the Chris Craft Corsair I tried to rebuild.

If you don't mind a bit of unsolicited advice, get a small soft rubber
hammer and sound out the rest of the transom. I'm sure you know the
sound of dead wood vs good wood. The reason I say that is there might
be some top-down rot in that transom that you haven't discovered yet.
I know when I found that problem, I was concerned that it wasn't the
only place and boy was I right.

Having said that, the repair looks really good - for what it's worth,
you're doing a good job with it.

In case your interested, I decided to cut the whole transom out of the
Corsair and replace it. When I did that, I discovered that the
fiberglass capsulated stringers had rotten through - as in all that
was left was some little pieces of wood and a lot of wood compost
under the fiberglass. :) So I pulled up the floor and found that
the glass had gone soft all the way to the hull - that was that. Cut
the hull up and took it do the dump. :)