Re: Aluminum v hull restoration, how-to's? Lmuss53's 171CC Sea Nymph Striper
So today I started putting stuff back in. The transom is done and back in the boat, with a 1/8 inch outer (facing in?) skin from a sheet of fiberglass locally manufactured, similar to shower enclosure. I spray glued it on in place of the aluminum skin that was behind the old splashwell. The old skin was shot and didn't cover the whole transom, and I needed something a little thicker than the .060 aluminum sheet. I'll paint it along with the other interior panels, and time will tell if this was a good or bad idea. I took the flapper wheel to it for about 1 minute to trim the edges back and that was plenty of glass grinding for me.
Tomorrow I am going to cheat a little and take the boat to a local truck body place and have them build a new 10 inch taller base for the Tracker console, finish the gunwales back to the new transom skin, filling in where the old splashwell was, and make a shiny new transom cap. I want the boat to look nice and I know the limits of my skills, so off to a pro it goes for a little work.
When I get it back I think we go to interior paint, then out to flip it for outside paint, then onto the new trailer and back in for interior finishing. I am already committed to working March 24, and 31, but I have scheduled vacation for every Friday in April to get me out of Saturday and Sunday OT, it's time to finish this boat and get Striper fishing.
I had planned to sell the other trailer but one of my co-workers has a Starcraft of some sort sitting in a field. The trailer is rusted out from under it, the insides are rotted out and all he knows about it is that it has a walk through windshield, is 17 feet long, and had a 65 Johnson on it at one time. The motor sheered some sort of flywheel key and they pulled the boat in the field and haven't been back. He said he'd sell it to me for the scrap price. Maybe I'll just hang on to this other trailer for a while.
