RESTORING TWO SUNFISH

 Now we get to the big stuff.

Today, 28 Feb, dawned clear and bright and you could hear the bells ringing for miles. Or at least it seemed like it, due to my hangover. Maybe it wasn't bells ringing, but my head? Anyway, at about 10AM I went to my friend's house and finished sanding the second rudder. It really looks great, except for a crack in it near the top.

When my friend returned from his trip to the hardware store (for a totally unrelated project - a homebuilt tig welder) we carried Boat Two from the side yard to some saw horses near the garage.


My friend and his boat


We decided to work on the severely-cracked keel (see part 1) first. We took the hand-grinder and removed all the structurally-deficient fiberglass from the damaged area.


Grinding away the crummy stuff.

This kind of sucked because little bits of fiberglass were blowing everywhere. My friend went and put on a mask, and I just tried to stay upwind with the camera. When the damage was cut out, I reached in with some 40-grit paper and cleaned up inside the keel. Then we spent probably 40 minutes cutting a piece of oak board to just the right angles so that it would fit inside the damaged part of the keel.


The finished oak insert.

The holes are there so that we could use eye-hooks as handles while moving the oak into position.



Mixin' up some epoxy

The next step was for us to mix up some epoxy and mix it with flox to slather onto the oak insert and glue it into place. This we did, and in just a few minutes the insert was very sticky and ready to be inserted into the boat.





We also applied some of the epoxy to the inside of the damaged keel. Then we inserted the wooden "structural patch," moved it into position, and using another board on the outside of the boat, we tightened the eye hook down to pull the oak piece tightly against the inside of the keel. Then we flipped the boat over so that any running epoxy would fill in the inevitable gaps. Finally, we put a small space heater below the patch so that the heat would cure the epoxy more quickly.



The oak insert being pulled firmly to the inside of the keel

It was at this point that we realized we still had lots of leftover flox-epoxy.

Quickly I grabbed some 40-grit paper and a screwdriver. While using the screwdriver to gently pry apart the split seam in the side of the hull (see part 1), I sanded as best I could inside the split seam to remove old and dirty fiberglass and expose the "fresh" stuff underneath. After a few minutes I used the ubiquitous compressed-air to blow the dust out of the seam and then we slathered in as much glue as we could, covered with a plastic drop cloth, and clamped the seam. Then we brought my friend's big double-halogen lights over and set them up about 12" from the seam to provide heat.




We actually wound up using twice this many clamps. Clamps are your friend. The orange hose is compressed air.
The cockpit is a convenient place to set the hose. The paper cup has flox-epoxy in it.

While I was bored in-between other things, I 400-grit sanded several areas on the boat to remove oxidization and restore the factory-new shininess. The areas I did look really nice. We also spent some time and elbow-grease wet-sanding the "property of..." stencil from the bow of the boat.


This took a lot of work to remove. More than I expected.


I also applied some flox-free epoxy to the split in Boat Two's rudder. The other wooden bits are nearly completed but I have only gone so far as to sand the rudder  to the 400-grit level since I couldn't spray it until we glued the split. (The split is underneath where the rudder hardware goes so you can't see it, and it probably wouldn't even have been a structural issue, but I felt better about the whole thing after it had been glued. I have a picture but there's no point in wasting bandwidth on a photo of a board with a glued crack in one end.)  Then we went to Lowe's to buy a couple more things and to Pizza Hut for dinner.

When we returned, a few pokes at the cup with the leftover epoxy told us that it was cured. First we moved the halogen lights to one side and then carefully removed the clamps and plastic from the seam. Voilá! It looks terrific. Just needs for the excess that squirted out to be ground flush with the seam:





One section of the cured seam. The epoxy is tough stuff!
Try as I might, I couldn't break off any of those gooshed-out bits.


Then we flipped the boat over, removed the eye-hook, and then wrestled the pine board from the outside of the hull. It had gotten a few dabs of epoxy on it and was also therefore glued to the hull. We successfully removed  the board but it left behind some splinters. All that's left to do here is clean this area up a little and then lay some fiberglass over the oak and it will probably be by far the strongest part of the whole boat.



The oak is in there. I gave it a good, firm push to see if I could break it loose but it ain't goin' nowhere.
The scuffs you can see are from the 40-grit paper I used since we need a rough surface for bonding the fiberglass.

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Sunday, 29 Dec: Today I went over to his house about 10AM and sprayed urethane on both Boat One's and Boat Two's rudder and Boat Two's daggerboard. Yesterday I put the final coat of urethane on Boat One's daggerboard. Now the brass clip just needs to be polished and I can call it done.

Then my buddy whipped out his power grinder and proceeded to remove the gelcoat from around yesterday's keel patch. When he was done with that, he went around the boat and removed any loose and/or damaged bits of gelcoat, on the theory that we could replace it all with white epoxy. In so doing, we discovered the possible reason for that hole drilled in the keel: lots of the places with cracked gelcoat had a hole in the fiberglass underneath! At this point he was starting to wonder if the boat was worth the $150 he paid for it. Meanwhile I was using a razor blade to remove the old Idaho registration stickers.


Here you can see an example of the holed fiberglass with the keel patch in the background

Then we spent about 30 minutes cutting bits of scrap bi-directional fiberglass he had to fit the various areas that needed to be glassed. When we had cut sufficient bits of glass, he mixed up some more epoxy and flox-epoxy and we proceeded to glass over most of the damaged areas. The keel where we started to work yesterday took seven layers of glass to cover the wooden patch and another three layers to fill out where the gelcoat was. The most interesting part was dealing with the 1" drilled hole that was just ahead of the daggerboard slot. (See part 1) How do you fill a hole with no back? The glue will fall right through! I came up with the solution for this one: I cat the bottom out of a Solo cup and ran a wire through the center, then slathered quick-cure epoxy on the plastic disc, folded it, and pushed it through the hole, then pulled up on the wire. This pulled the sticky plastic circle against the inside of the drilled hole. After holding it like that for about 8 minutes (my hands were getting TIRED) the epoxy had cured enough for me to fill the hole with flox-epoxy. Then I laid about 4 layers of glass over the flox.



Here you can see fiberglass laid over several formerly-damaged areas.


Then about the time we finished with this, Ahab had to go in and shower since a bunch of us were going to see The Passion. Good movie, but it deserves its R rating - definately not for kids; but I digress.... I sprayed on another layer of urethane on the wooden bits, then went in and changed my shirt so I didn't smell bad.

For next weekend I think we'll work on the trailer some, as well as use white epoxy to fill the remaining divots in the hull of Boat Two and color the now gray patches. We may also attempt to use our new homemade tig welder as a power supply to anodize the aluminum rudder hardware. 8)


On to Part 4
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