Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

[Yacht Dr.]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

Hi Russ..

Just to let you know .. Poly over Epoxy is a no no ..

PM me with your contact and Ill post back with My Conversation about How to Patch a transom with this stuff..

YD.

PS. Do they have a warranty on " patch stringers/trans " .. um. dont think so.

PSS. There is Soo much wrong with your #18 post with Steve its crazy !

 

[ondarvr]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

Steve buys epoxy from someone else and then adds thinners to it, we formulate, test and make our resins globally, to a person our chemists say using poly over epoxy is a bad idea. I have tried it over fully cured and well prepped epoxy and I was never able to get a bond that I was happy with or would trust.

Can thinned epoxies be used under un-thinned epoxy...yes...but why would you, rot prevention depends on encapsulation not penetration and regular epoxy bonds very well to wood without being thinned. If you drill into the wood and don't seal the hole and water gets in, the wood will rot no matter what resin is used, and this is the most common cause of failure.

Will a highly thinned epoxy soak into rotten wood deeper than un-thinned epoxy...yes...but why would you knowingly leave rotten wood in any structural part of the boat if you are going to go through the effort to fix it and want it to last.

When someone finds rotten wood in their transom, how do they know the couple of places they dig out and replace are the only ones in there. Just look at the number of people that post on this site saying they just have a small soft spot in the floor and everything else is in good shape, only to find after removing the floor the stringers and transom are pulp too. 3" in any direction from the spot they dug out could be rotten too and they would never know.

 

[ezmobee]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

It would seem to me, that although you have repaired the compressive strength of the transom in that area, the patch has done nothing to restore the overall lateral strength.....the strength of the full sheet of ply that distributes the engine's forces.

 

[Utahboatnut]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

I agree with EZ, with all of those little tiny pieces the overall strength has been totally compromised. Otherwise they would use a patchwork of scraps to make all the transoms in boats. I am not discounting your work, It just seems that if you were that far into the whole thing you should bite the bullett and do it all, right, once. Pulling the motor, drive, etc is a good part of the battle to begin with.

 

[ondarvr]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

Russ


I re-read some of it and here are my concerns.

1 You dug out the obvious rotten wood, but how much more is in there.

2 Lets assume CPES does everything they claim and more, it will still only "fix" the spots where it was used, not any other undetected rotten areas.

3 Using polyester resin and then only cloth over the repaired area is a very weak patch. Cloth bonds poorly when used with polyester resin, it needs mat for it to stick well to the substrate and then mat between each layer so they will stick together. Then the fact that it was used over epoxy, which polyester has a tough time bonding to even with the best surface prep, and it adds up to a less than ideal repair. It also looks like not all of the area under the cloth was sanded (dark areas), if it?s not thoroughly sanded with a coarse grit it won?t bond all that well to the existing laminate.

4 Since you removed everything (outdrive, etc) to do the temporary repair, it wouldn't have taken that much more work to do the entire thing. And if it was $300.00 for materials to that small repair it wouldn't have cost much more to do all of it. Now if you stick with the original plan to just use it for the season and then do a complete rebuild later, next year you will need to do all of this over again.



I think the issue is if this is a temporary repair there was no need to spend $300.00 on epoxy, it would have been fine to use much less costly products and they would have lasted more than long enough. If this is supposed to be a permanent repair then not enough work was done to ensure you won?t be doing it again soon, and this has nothing to do with the products used.

I don't doubt the repair will hold up, most boats are over built when new and even when most of the wood is nothing more than pulp they tend to hold together and the owner may not even now there's a problem until they see some gel coat cracks. Sometimes they live with these cracks for many years before doing any repairs, only to find the wood was mush.

 

[Cadwelder]

Re: Is Patching this Transom Possible?...or safe?

I don't doubt the repair will hold up, most boats are over built when new and even when most of the wood is nothing more than pulp they tend to hold together and the owner may not even now there's a problem until they see some gel coat cracks. Sometimes they live with these cracks for many years before doing any repairs, only to find the wood was mush.

This is oh so true, just had this very conversation with a fellow iboater yesterday. I have done restores that performed beautifully on the water and seemed in great shape, but upon starting the restore, the transom was trash and the stringer gone. The reason I'm bringing this up is to say that no one can predict how long anything will last, only that we want everyone safe and the only way to insure that is to make sure all repairs are done properly and thouroughly, and not just patched up.