Commander 147

[ebb]

...'let the game begin.'
Be interesting to see how you wrestle* with this one!
Mike Goodwin called it tunafish.
Think it a bit better to deal with rotton tuna balsa fish than rotton plywood that others get into.
Count yerself lucky!
Haven't had to do A-338's deck YET.
But it does look like if you do it in sections at a time'
it's not too big a deal. Big costly!!!!
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*Collegiate and Olympic wrestling is great sport to watch. I do mean watch.
Here are some takedown moves you'll have use on your deck:
double leg - single leg - high crotch - duck under - standing switch - stuff the head - head lock - and the front head lock. Got that?
(taken from wikipedia)

[Commander 147]

I guess I'll take a break for a few hours and let it cool back down some before I grind the edges of the cutout down to a bevel. I got the first section this far and found some not so rotten balsa. So I'll do this section complete and move onto the next section. I get in and out of the boat here so I want this area solid again as soon as possible.

[Commander 147]

Well, last night around 6:30 the temperature dropped to 88 degrees so I went back out started to grind around the perimeter so when I lay my glass down over the new balsa core the top of the deck will end up at the same place it was berfore I started and everything will look fair and smooth. About half way through I looked up and the shelter was one big cloud of fiberglass dust. This morning when I went back out there everything was covered on a thick layer of fiberglass snow. It took me 2 hours to clean it all up so I could work again.

Once I got everything cleaned up I installed the tiller so I could sit on the cockpit seat and decide where I wanted to put my genoa winches later. I decided the most convienient place for them was just forward of the deck scupper drain. That area will not have any balsa it will get built up with layers of 1708 (I have lots of small pieces left over from other work) and epoxy.

Then I took some finishing cloth I had and wet it out over some holes in the bottom skin for the deck where hardware had been previously. I needed to plug the holes for the balsa install and that was an easy way to do it.

Yesterday when I dug out all the wet balsa (or as Ebb says tuna) I dug out under the perimeter of my cutout also. So now it was time to pack that area back in with thickened epoxy. It took 36 oz of epoxy with cabosil in it to fill the perimeter edges.

There is a very wide variance in the thickness of the top skin of the deck and also of how thick the gap is for the balsa core. In some areas the top skin was 5/16" thick and in other areas it was 1/8" thick. And in some areas the core gap is 3/8" and in other areas it is 3/16" thick. As Ebb says I will need to do some serious wrestling to make this all come out looking good later. The game is only in the first quarter for this project.

It looks like some of Florida's imfamous Love Bugs got into the epoxy in the second picture and could not get back out.