During the last week I managed to work on the scraping every day except Friday.
This was the state of the port hull on Wednesday morning, 07:05 to be precise…
… and this was the hull on Thursday afternoon with all of the paint, both topside and antifoul scraped off. I still have to sand the hull but for right now, I need to do a few other tasks and let my aching arms and hands recover bit.
The plan had been to do a strip of scraping and then another boat task, but in the end I just carried on with the scraping. Now it was time to do a few other boat things before starting on the other side.
Today I decided that the first boat tasks would be to make a start on the new skeg.
The piece of Cedar I bought was rough sawn both sides which meant that the first thing to do was to plane off the majority of the saw marks.
That didn’t take long. Notice that the end of the board has started to crack. My fault entirely, I should have painted the ends as soon as I received the board.
One edge had been cut square and it was a quick and easy job to cut off the live edge. I’m using a long, straight piece of metal as a fence extension to keep the board straight and a roller support to take the weight of the board at the start of the cut.
I used the cardboard template to mark the skeg on the board allowing just the width of the saw blade between the two pieces.
To make the angled cut I used hot glue to fix a piece of wood against the timber that will hold the board at the correct angle to make the cut.
Not much later I had two skeg-shaped pieces of timber.
Now it was just a case of glueing them together. The timber is pretty flat so I’ll just use cramps for this job.
I used Titebond III as the adhesive, I did think of using epoxy but decided that since the skeg is going to be sheathed in epoxy and fibreglass cloth and that Titebond III is a waterproof glue, there was no benefit to using the more expensive epoxy.
One question that I have been considering since I removed the rotten part of the transom, is whether the entire thing should be replaced. This would not be an easy job all due to the bevel that would need to be cut on the replacement transom. This would be a rolling bevel, meaning that it changes angle from one end to the other and it would also mean that the new transom would need to be inserted from the bottom when looking at the upside down hull.
I had cut back the transom until I reached good plywood so the question became how likely is it that the other side of the transom has suffered the same problem. It sounds good and the surveyor didn’t note any soft returns from that side of the plywood so the chances are that the rest of the transom is sound.
I looked closer at the corner of the boat the lower right as you look at it in the photos and I could see that part of the hull itself was a little rotten. On looking further I saw that this was not a big area of rot but I noticed that the hull to deck joint had cracked and that seems to be the point at which water had been getting in resulting in the degraded plywood. I wondered if that corner of the boat had hit something hard when being sailed which had cracked all the glue joints in that area. It would certainly would explain why just hta corner allowed water in.
I scraped away all of the soft timber that I could reach and applied penetrating epoxy using a brush and a syringe with a large bore blunt needle to “inject” the epoxy into the split joints and then coated the area around where the soft wood had been.
Time for a cup of tea.
Next task, once the glue on the new skeg had set up a bit, was to cut the bottom with a shallow vee-shape to fit the sloping keel.
Firstly I glued two mixing sticks together with hot glue, resting them on either side of the keel whilst the glue cooled. Then I measured the angle so that I can set the table saw. My handy-dandy protractor gave a 10º angle, so I set the blade to 85º and made two cuts.
The result was pretty good, as you can see.
Here is the skeg resting on the keel. It isn’t upright but I’ll trim that out during the fitting of the skeg. The bottom needs to be hollowed slightly since the keel is curved. Something for another day, methinks.
Time for a cup of tea.
Moving on I decided to prepare the plywood for the transom. The original plywood was 3/4″ thick, which is 19mm, or thereabouts. I don’t have any good plywood that thick and I don’t want to spend around £100 getting an 8′ x 4′ x 18mm sheet of Marine Plywood only to use a quarter of it. However, I do have 6mm Marine Plywood and I can laminate three layers of that to get 18mm, which will be close enough.
So, having cut the three pieces I set up the paraphernalia to vacuum clamp the three pieces together. Again, like the skeg and for the same reasons, I decided to use Titebond III. But before I could do that I had to clean out the pump on the top of the glue bottle as it has become blocked with old glue and would not pump glue any more.
That was a bit of a chore, but now I know how the pump works and how easy it is to clean it.
I used a 25mm thick piece of chipboard that had a smooth veneer on the surface as the base for the clamping. It was flat enough for this task. Then it was get everything cut and ready for the glue up. Once the glue had been applied and the laminates stacked, the netting was put on the top, then the plastic cover that already had the vacuum and gauge fittings fitted. I had laid out the butyl tape on the base board before starting to apply the glue, so it was just a case of remove the backing tape, press the plastic down on the tape and start the pump.
The pump is only pulling about 0.5 bar in the photo but I did go around after taking the shot to close up all the leaks and eventually get a vacuum of 0.95 bar, I let the pump run for an hour before stopping the pump and removing the various parts. Usually the glue sets up enough to be unclamped in around 20 minutes, so an hour was more than enough for this job.
Tomorrow I’ll take a look at shaping the plywood.
I really want to get the transom repaired before it is time to turn Shoal Waters the right way up so that the hull is not deformed in any way by the procedure due to the reinforcement of the transom. Preferably, I’d lie tp get it done before I start sheathing the hull as I want to sheath the transom up to the waterline to ensure that the hull to transom joint is strengthened and sealed.
For now, that is a good days’ work.
Time for a cup of tea.