Re: procraft stringers and deck, feel your pain
Re: procraft stringers and deck, feel your pain
Procraft is (or was) manufactured in Tennessee. I have a 1985 Procraft bass boat with a 50 HP Mercury. I bought it early last summer to take my boys fishing and to bond, while we completed the many necessary repairs, including rotten bottom. The boys and I comleted the urgently needed repairs and got it in shape to fish by laying a piece of plywood over the rotten deck. Fished all summer and had fun. When cold weather arrived I put it in garage to start the difficult repairs that we had procrastinated on. That is when the boys disappeared! Deck was rotten in front of cockpit and in stern storage area. I optomistically assumed that I would have to replace the rotten plywood but that it would be fairly easy. I was wrong! The rear 1/3 of two of the three stringers were so rotten that grubs were living in them. I had to cut the cockpit out of the boat, remove the entire deck, chisel out the stringers and replace. It has been a monumental job and I am only now seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Had I recognized the extent of the needed repairs, I would never have purchased the boat.
There were a number of big problems in this boat that your boat may share. 1. As far as I could tell, none of the wood in the boat was sealed or encapsulated, except for the stringers and they were partially encapsulated by the glass that held them in place.
2. The foam "floatation" was made of the same foam that florists use to hold water in floral arrangements. Yes, that's right, they used open-cell water-holding foam for "floatation" and this foam was holding water against the stringers. My guess is that the boat would have sunk within 30 minutes if swamped. Nearly all of the foam below the deck was still saturated after sitting in my garage for a month.
3. The cockpit had several drainage holes in the upper surface that drained water directly into the horizontal foam below the decks.
4. The part of the cockpit which holds the livewell has no drainage into the bilge. So water from any livewell leaks or spashes sat under the cockpit until it soaked through into the foam.
5. They fastened the plywood mat and the deck to the stringers with hundreds of staples. These staples created multiple pathways for water to enter the stringers.
I have removed all the open cell foam I could reach and replaced it with styrofoam and the expanding sealing foam like you can buy from Home Depot. I have replaced the deck with plywood and glassed over it. I will put another layer of glass on top of that to add strength. I have painted all the plywood that I put into the boat and all the existing plywood (that I didn't have to replace) with polyester resin thinned with acetone.
I am currently in the process of re-attaching the cockpit, and like everything else I have done on this boat, it is more difficult and is taking much longer than I expected. On the bright side, the transom seems to be rock solid.
You didn't say how water was getting into your boat. My boat has FOUR through-hulls. Two of which so were brittle that they broke off when I gave the hoses a tug. I will replace all of the through-hulls before I put it back in the water.
I would be glad to share any lessons learned.
