March 15 2010 Hipnautical Repair
Well it was a morning of scraping some extra caulk off of the top of the cockpit, but then it was off to IMP in Burnside to buy some resin and get some ideas from Carl Crowell, a fellow Dartmouth Yacht Club member who worked in the store. He suggested some silica to put in with the OP Fibreglass Resin to make a peanut butter consistency resin spread and place the marine ¾ inch plywood into it. Then as it cures, replace the top skin and resin in the top.
We decided to check on Hip and see how much the area dried. It was pretty wet along the edges, which was not making me happy.
Time to use the hammer and chisel.
The greyish scrapings are rotted core+resin. Smelled sharp and chemically.
The following 2 pictures should give you an idea of how much room we have to do this repair
Stern view up there , bow below
The covering makes everything blue, but in 6 degree Celsius external temp, the inner temp for us today with a heater got to 26 degrees! This should be more than enough to cure the resin tomorrow!
The day continued in the same way, with lots of chiselling and scraping. Thankfully we kept using the ShopVac and kept the toxic dust to a minimum.
In fact we ended up going to Kent Building Supplies and getting a ShopVac miniature cleaning set for the smaller areas, which I used for about 30 minutes sucking up all the detritus from our work over the season.
We began to figure out the orientation and measured our templates for the plywood tomorrow, looks like we are going to go port to starboard in 5 inch thick slices.
We have to remember that we need to drill up thru those holes into the plywood so we have a place for the hardware to be reset.
We used a wire brush attachment on the old Black and Decker cordless drill to get the area to this point by the end of the day. The grey areas are hopefully going to be dry by the morning tomorrow. We cant really go any further without breaking thru the skin.
More to follow tomorrow!
Brad J Boudreau
Hipnautical
Grampian Discovery 79 hull #38