Every thing is Awesome !! I am looking forward to see the final product. So many great ideas all together. My 52c is 1986 too. HATCS379L586. The ER door is real nice. Do you have consider to enter the engine room thru the salon ??
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Every thing is Awesome !! I am looking forward to see the final product. So many great ideas all together. My 52c is 1986 too. HATCS379L586. The ER door is real nice. Do you have consider to enter the engine room thru the salon ??
I agree on vinyl ester versus epoxy. I think the reason epoxy is still so popular is that 1) most of us learned to do these repairs when the choice was poly or epoxy (my experience has been that poly doesn't work well for repairs) 2) one company in particular, West System, wrote a lot of the literature, which is geared to repairs and boatbuilding projects, so of course they featured their own product, which IS a very good system 3) 3M, who are the major brand in vinylester, was late to the market and perhaps hasn't promoted it asd aggressively as they could have, although they do a good job promoting it.
Most of the cost of the small repairs i do is epoxy, but since I haven't taken on major projects like this one, I haven't had to make the choice. I think that for a project like this (structural, above the waterline, etc) vinylester is the rational choice. It is at least as good as epoxy, plus you don't have the amine blush problem, and it is cheaper, and there is now a huge amount of experience with it. Plus 3M supports their products as well as anyone does.
Can't wait to see the completion photos on Southpaw; this project is really a tour de force.
Incidentally, the thing that really made this kind of work much more effective and practical for me was the availability of Coosa board, plus the ability to get preformed fiberglass structural elements from companies like McMaster and Strongwell. When you can buy a panel instead of having to lay it up yourself, things go a lot better and faster. I have keel repairs in my boat done with panel I laid up on glass sheets with peel-ply, but if I have to do something like that again, I would just buy the panel and not make it myself.
I agree with this statement 110%. If I had to do it again I would have bought at least some pre-laminated panels to be used as outer facing/visible areas. It would have added cost and to the purchasing difficulty, I'm not so good at judging material quantity needed lol.
I suspect that like me, you order too much. And then have to find another project to use up the extra lol.
Oh, boy, have I been there.
Jim,
What "fiberglass structural element" are you referring to.
I will be doing my foredeck from the top using biaxial and coosa board - my winter project. Last winter I did my cockpit flooring from above and the job went very well. Using additional structural elements sounds like a great idea, something I had not thought of. :D
Jon
I will take a shot at this one. There's all kinds of fiberglass shapes available such as: many sizes of angle, u shape, rectangular box, square box, tubing, rod, threaded rod, I-beam. And then solid frp panels and cored panels.
A few years ago we lost our mind and built a 10' x 20' floating dock out of fiberglass I-beam and other assorted fiberglass shapes that's fastened with SS bolts and 5200, there's some West epoxy too in a few spots just because we can't help ourselves sometimes.
luckily most of the pieces came from an industrial liquidator that sells excess, mostly metals, but had all this frp stuff at the time for around 10 cents on the dollar.
Cricket,
Thank you for that.
I think I will be using 1/4 inch flat panel along with coosa board and biaxial with West epoxy when I do my foredeck this winter. It should save me some time.
Jon