Work Day 2

Feb 14 2013
        Today we actually started working on gutting the boat. I suppose I should qualify "we."  Without my partner in crime Dan none of this would be possible.  Dan was nice enough to lend his truck for the road trip to Oklahoma and help out in technical expertise with tools and engineering.  The guy after all is an engineer so should be good to have.  Both of us enjoy doing this project and see it as a challenge to complete.  While Dan heads up technical side of our team, I cover the more sailing and boat maintenance side for boating specific tasks (bottom paint, reglassing etc...).  Needless to say though Dan is a key part of the boat restoration project.

As I began work today I was really nervous about what we would find under the fiberglass, this would tell us how much work we had. Sort of the pandora's box of prices for how much we will have to restore and buy.  Based on all the water coming out through the drilled hole (a constant flow/slow drip) I knew we had a lot in the hull.  The first place we worked on was one of the side benches. It looked as though someone had already sawed a small line along the inside of the bench. Simply by pulling and cutting a few more places we ripped this piece right off.

This was taken after we cleaned out the inside.  But shows where we ripped out.  

Inside we found green foam core blocks about 3'X1' with lots of white bubble balls.  All of this was used for flotation of the boat if the fiberglass was punctured, a federal law.  The core foam blocks were green and looked like the kind you use for fake plants in a vase.  These bricks were soaked with water or iced over and weighed probably 20 lbs a piece(they are not supposed to be wet or weigh that much). So they had been soaking a ton of water.  We probably took 20 of these peieces out of the right side alone.  Then we used the shop vac to suck out as many little balls as we could.    

Me holding the green foam the way we found it. The entire bench was stuffed full with these bricks, you can see how soaked it is and that it is really old so probably stock 1971!

After we removed all the foam we went exploring to try to see what was under and around here.  We weren't sure if it was a sealed compartment or continuous.  We found it this area runs all the way to the bow and the port and starboard side are not separated.

You can see here how damaged the plywood top is, which is the highest moisture reading on the boat at about 35%.  This view is looking towards teh bow, you can see how the foam balls lay with the foam bricks. 

With the left side done we called it a day and decided to rip out the right side tomorrow.  We spent a total of about 2 hours today working.