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Returned home from the Thanksgiving Holiday late Saturday evening after logging a grueling 1740 miles on overcrowded highways (I'll pay 10 times as much to fly before I do that again). Didn't think I'd have much energy left but with the help of my friends Karl and Ken, we got to work mid morning on Sunday. By early afternoon, we had the transom core dry fit in the boat. The clamps I came up with were home made jobbers fashioned out of 3x4 landscape timbers and 1/2" threaded rod.
I picked the
straightest pieces of lumber I could find. At $2.60 each, I wasn't complaining.
Pretty inexpensive really. The threaded rod was cut in 16" sections - a bit long
but I didn't want to chance making them too short. During the dry fit, we just
pre set one side so we'd have little tightening to do during the install.
We pre-staged all the resin, hardener and tools we'd need. All in all we used a
gallon and a pint of resin.
Karl kept us in a constant supply of catalyzed resin while Ken and I wet out the wood. We added a layer of 3/4 oz mat followed by a layer of 1.5 oz mat. Resin (vinylester) was catalyzed at 3/4 percent which gave us a working time approaching 40 minutes - plenty to do the job. Just before setting the board in place, I layed a thick fillet of milled fibers and resin along the bottom edge of the transom skin to fill any voids created by the setback I'd ground on the new core. We slid her into place, inserted all the lumber pieces/threaded rod and tightened them up with a cordless impact driver. Worked like a champ. Got a really good squeeze out all the way around.
The holes we didn't use gave the excess resin plenty of places to escape. It also gave us a real good indicator that we'd gotten good coverage across the transom. I was very, very pleased with the results. I tented the whole thing off with some plastic sheeting and ran heat lamps overnight to assist in the cure. Will leave her bolted in place until the rains move through on Tuesday. Hope to lay up the inner skin on Wednesday. I am so glad to have this part of the job behind me.
