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thru-hulls, delamination and fiberglass work - oh, my!
This is what we're looking at on Augusta, Commander #303. You can see the damaged area at the waterline on the right of the picture. This one has about everythign worng with it that you might not want: the hull was punched through below the waterline, there was a bad repair and extensive delamination behind the bulkhead and on the interior of the hull and then they put a truly bad Rustoleum paint job on top of it.
We have stripped the hull of the old paint & gotten an idea of the size of the hole - next step is to tackle that problem. I'll make sure to include shots of the interior - that's where things get really interesting.
oh yeah - what we did about the boom eyelet
Like so many others, our boom came off in my partners hand one day in the yard (has this happened to anyone at sea?) and we aren't replacing the whole thing just yet.
We're trying a cheapo fix to the boom eyelet problem - a friend that's a metals guy bored out the back of the original piece and cut a counter sink made out of hardened steel into it. The original bolt should fit that. It's quick and cheap and gets our boom back on, but we'll have to wait until next season to see how well it works. If it doesn't, our friend says he'll bore one out of stainless steel for us.
At least it's solved for now.
bulkhead removal is a snap
I couldn't believe how easy this was. i thought it was going to be a nightmare because every book I have ever read about it says you should sand down the tabs to remove interior pieces. Some suggested a Sawzall, but it seemed like it would do a lot more damage than anything and we still wanted the old bulkhead as a template for the new one that we wanted to put in.
We used my brother's Dremel. It let me get into tight spaces, to cut the tabs and only the tabs, and to remove the whole bulkhead and berth intact. It took about 2 hours at a pretty easy pace. Next, we'll use a cold chisel to get rid of the extra tabbing and sand it fair. In fact, we used a cold chisel to knock out some of the trickier angles. Almost no dust.
Man, it felt good to rip out that bulkhead. Now we've got a clear working area around our puncture, can replace the dry-rotted bulkhead and replace the old plastic laminate with something more to our liking.
Love that Dremel.