On Jan 15, 12:20*pm, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
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. *:)

Thanks :-)

I did a floor/stringer repair on this boat about 4 years ago. The
transom checked out ok then and the rest of it seems pretty solid now
when you bang around on it with a mallet. I think this area is
marginal because it's at the bottom and has had the crack in it for a
while. Overall it's probably not perfect but I think it's in better
shape that what you ran into. Had the transom been gone back when I
did the floor I believe I would have gone the same route you did. As
it was, that work was far more than I thought it would be and I'd
probably not do that again.

When I did the floor repair I used those composite deck surfacing
boards as stringers. I also left the foam out. The foam was clearly
trapping water in places when I pulled the floor up. I now have drain
holes across the stringers at the rear and again about 2/3rds of the
way to the bow. I put access holes with those round screw in covers
in floor in the back under the sun deck so I can check the stringer
drain holes periodically.

The boat has spent most of it's life in a garage when not in use and
I'm pretty religious about drying it out. I open all the covered
storage spaces and the sun deck after I put it in the garage. I even
have three of those little 12" round fans that I will stick in it when
I think it's gotten wetter than usual. I keep the inside storage
spaces sprayed regularly with lysol to prevent mold.