I have a 31' F31 Trojan which has a soft rear deck. Anyone with experience and
suggestions for this repair? Plans are to remove the top skin, recore and
replace the original skin if possible. Any alternatives? What core materials
recommended to be good in this application besides plywood? Joe.

I'm not sure if we are talking about a glassed over plywood deck, or a
molded fiberglass deck with a core.

It does not matter either way, my advise is to use the same material as
they used when it was built.

I had a trawler surveyed once that had a lot of rotten wood replaced.
The surveyor told me that who ever did the work didn't go far enough
into good wood, and the whole thing will have to be done over, and, he
said that the work should be done from the under side, not breaking the
"original skin".

I didn't buy that boat.

After looking at other's projects since, I can see the wisdom of both
those points.

Jim

Mark30h wrote:
I have a 31' F31 Trojan which has a soft rear deck. Anyone with experience and
suggestions for this repair? Plans are to remove the top skin, recore and
replace the original skin if possible. Any alternatives? What core materials
recommended to be good in this application besides plywood? Joe.

Jim called it right. The repair should be done from the bottom of possible.
I've worked on 4 such projects but the repair I did first using up a lot of
scraps of plywood left over from a cold molded boat project was the
strongest but not the easiest. The proper amount of epoxy to use is the
trickiest part. It's hard to do but you want the minimum amount of epoxy you
can use to get the job done.
I believe too much epoxy makes for far more bad repairs than to little.
Balsa and other core materials are easy to find from the fiberglass
dealers. Read a couple of books if you can.
I really can't reccomend any specific book since like all do it yourself
books they're too expensive to begin with and usually only actually contain
a couple of useful pages of information in the book.


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