Just wanted to update. I got a lot of
advice here and from a few people that have been fixing these boats up for a long time. For anyone else interested in doing their own
project, I'll post some photos and links to what I'm doing.
To start, the boat needs a lot of work, but I don't mind. I've been
learning a lot about boat
maintenance and
repair just researching this
project. I'm going from the bottom up.
The first thing the boat needed was to re-attach the keel properly. I decided to drop it and replace the bolts, but it was really because there was a lot of rust coming from the compromised
epoxy that bonded the keel to the
hull. Water that had obviously gotten in between the top of the keel flange and the hull.
This was a challenge in itself because the
trailer isn't very well designed, and when I bought stands to
lift the boat off the
trailer I was pretty disappointed to find it still didn't leave much room to work.
The next challenge was removing the old keel bolts which, as it turns out, still had many years of life left in them. I'll take a
photo next time I go to the boat to work on it. six of the eight bolts were removed with a ratchet and breaker bar, but the last two (of course) were seized. So, when the nut turned, so did the bolt.
I cut those bolts but it was a messy job and I accidentally hit the glass of the hull a few times, so I'll have to patch that up. Doing a patch would be a lot easier if the part of the hull where the bolts come up through (there's a term for it but I forget) wasn't lined with some plastic-ish material. So I guess I'll grind all of that out and just leave it bare glass, and maybe even put a layers of laminate down to beef up the area. Some of the glass got pretty hot when cutting out the bolts so I think maybe a few extra layers couldn't hurt.
Anyway, after doing that we still had to pry the keel off the hull. I didn't want to risk pulling apart the laminate of the hull but I was really out of ideas. Fortunately, no damage there.
What I found was strange. from the top of the bare iron flange to the hull, here's what I found: a layer of about a quarter inch of epoxy (no filler), some kind of paper with a glossy side up glued to the epoxy, then a similar layer of paper with a glossy side (down this time to meet the glossy surface on the top of the flange) and then the hull.
The last time this was done, it seems the owner glassed it in with epoxy, but there were a lot of compromises in the fairing around the flange and there was a fair amount of rust on the top of the flange.
Next challenge was just figuring out how to work in the tight space I had. I'm still working on that, but have laid the keel down on some
aluminum trailer beams running laterally so I can slide the keel around a bit.
Here's me before I laid the keel down completely.
I decided to grind it down to bare metal, oshpo, it and then apply about five (maybe more) layers of epoxy, no filler. You may doubt epoxy's ability to bond with metal (I know I did), but after spending hours and days chiseling, grinding, and scraping epoxy off the metal I no longer doubt its ability to hold.
I'm going to do this one side at a time simply because I can't get the keel out from under the boat where it is. So, I'll grind (almost finished with one side), clean, ospho, and then epoxy, and then I'll flip it over and repeat, making sure there's some over lap (just as you would glass the rails on a surfboard twice) so there's no seam or weak spot.
I'll post some links to videos soon.
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