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We acquired this boat from a friend of my neighbor a coupla months ago. It had been partially stripped and primed before it was put in the yard. It sat in that yard for about a year and half, but I was encouraged by the oil-injected Suzuki with only 37 hours since the rebuild. $1500 bucks, including motor and trailer. No (visible) damage.
There was no paint on the boat, so we needed to completely rip everything apart and start over. Here’s the console after sanding and filling cracks and holes with Marine-Tex.
A shot of our new family members: West System 105 Resin, 207 Hardener, and a can of fiber additive.
Basically completely stripped. Note the new seating arrangement. Someone had at one time build this nasty plywood box in between the livewells, and apparently moved the console back 6” to use that box as a bench. That had to go.
Most everything else came off without too much hassle. Except for the silicone, which was everywhere. I HATE silicone. Also note the mount for the silly captain’s chair right in the middle of the deck. That will have to go too, but at this time, we have no idea how, short of a sawzall. This was once a Florida flats boat that migrated to VA Beach for some surf fishing.
Remember how I said it did some surf fishing? Well, surf breaks, and it breaks stuff. We concluded the previous owner got a little too close to shore and landed the starboard side on something solid. It had been repaired with a piece of softwood and since glassed, but the rubrail fasteners weren’t sealed. Of course, we had some rot issues to deal with. We tore it out and laid a ½” x 10’ strip of spruce were the rail once was, and put two layers of glass over it. Well, as luck would have it, we suck with fiberglass and are a tad messy with resin. So not only did we have a lot of bubbles to bore and fill, but we have plenty of resin runs to sand off.
A closer look at the rail repair. We were actually surprised to find that if you cover a still-tacky Marine-Tex patch with West System epoxy, it forms a solid of strength previously unknown to modern man. So before we lay the final layer of 4” tape over the rail, we will smear the length of the repair with Marine-Tex and then cover it with West.
