cballard37
Cadet
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2010
- Messages
- 8
Hi everyone, So my brother and I have been restoring / repairing this flat bottom fiberglass boat he picked up on craigslist a little over a month ago and I thought i'd post some pics of what we've got done so far. Its been a journey to say the least, having no previous experience with these things, iboats has been a wealth of information and I thank you all.
So the deck was swollen with water, seat supports soaked up water because of a wood joint I would assume with the deck, you can see the swollen bulge.
We cut into the deck to inspect and the foam was saturated wood was all rotten falling apart so we bit our tongues and cut the whole deck out.
The previous owner had the boat on a trailer with just 3 misplaced rollers straight down the bottom middle of the boat. While it was filled with water (soaking the wood under the deck) it caused this horrid buckle and crack on the center of the hull.
To fix the buckle in the hull we took a 2 ton floor jack, turned the boat over and took a small bucket, and cranked up the hull to pop the disfigured dent out of the bottom. Leaving it overnight with pressure on it seemed to work great. Grind off the gel-coat and cleaned up the cracks. While the boat was over we cleaned up some drain holes we put in the bottom and glassed those over also. Used 7oz cloth.
Now on to the deck (gulp) That was one of those "I have no idea" type of things so I browsed on here and looked around and after I got some sort of mental picture of what we needed to do we dried and cleaned out the inside of the hull and where the deck was, letting it dry out in the Florida sun went pretty fast.
So the deck was swollen with water, seat supports soaked up water because of a wood joint I would assume with the deck, you can see the swollen bulge.
We cut into the deck to inspect and the foam was saturated wood was all rotten falling apart so we bit our tongues and cut the whole deck out.
The previous owner had the boat on a trailer with just 3 misplaced rollers straight down the bottom middle of the boat. While it was filled with water (soaking the wood under the deck) it caused this horrid buckle and crack on the center of the hull.
To fix the buckle in the hull we took a 2 ton floor jack, turned the boat over and took a small bucket, and cranked up the hull to pop the disfigured dent out of the bottom. Leaving it overnight with pressure on it seemed to work great. Grind off the gel-coat and cleaned up the cracks. While the boat was over we cleaned up some drain holes we put in the bottom and glassed those over also. Used 7oz cloth.
Now on to the deck (gulp) That was one of those "I have no idea" type of things so I browsed on here and looked around and after I got some sort of mental picture of what we needed to do we dried and cleaned out the inside of the hull and where the deck was, letting it dry out in the Florida sun went pretty fast.
