1 and 3 should be easy enough. Some cabosil to thicken 3 would be good. For 2 you could consider a clear hardener instead of standard, but even then the resin can probably be the same. Shelf life of epoxy is not an issue so if you have a long time between projects or don’t use it all now it’s ok.
Ok, thanks David: good to know about the shelf life. I'm kind of looking for a recommendation on what exact product to buy, too.
Hi Jay.
While it may be possible to use a QT container, it is hard to identify till you identify clearly how much is needed for each of the projects.
Project 1: I suspect you are guessing that the gobs of 4200/5200 is not doing the job. The question is hidden by all that stuff. You need to remove all the goop and get down to clean solid surface. Then you can identify if you will need Fiberglass and Resin, or just some fresh Goop. Do you need to add strength to the area (fiberglass) or just fill cracks and smooth the surface (perhaps fairing compound and thickened epoxy) will do the job. 2-6oz of epoxy might solve that problem. Or maybe not if extensive.
Project 2: Sealing plywood edges, have always been several applications of thin epoxy. The process has always been messy as the epoxy wants to run off the edges. It runs down the project. Is this going to be sitting down into water or up in the air near the ceiling of the cabin? It might be adequate to apply varnish on the edges if not sitting in water. Are you sure you have solved the source of the that messed up the bulk head requiring you to replace the rotted wood?
Project 3: How many screws are you filling? I would figure about 0.5oz per hole. Adding "kitty hair or Cabisol filler" to the epoxy will stretch the quantity. Big holes are more of a problem than small holes.
Those are my SWAG's.
John,
P1: I definitely intend to clean out / remove the old 4200/whatever-it-is, sand, and clean first. My thought was to use glass cloth and resin to make a bridge between the molded deck on top, and the sloped anchor locker surface on the bottom, maybe having put some 4200 in the crack first. The bottom sloped thing is a piece of plywood that they've tabbed in to a vertical piece of plywood that comes up behind the vertical molded deck. So the vertical deck bit touches the joint between 2 pieces of plywood, which are held together with a fiberglass joint. This joint is where all the water is dumped, and it's leaking there, I think. Or it was when the boat was tilted bow-up on jack stands over the winter. It's fine now. My plan was to do some layers of fiberglass over the whole joint to bond the hull to the anchor locker liner, and maybe continue this down 8"-12". I just really want it to never leak again. I'm sure the plywood is a bit compromised, but it's far from being totally rotted, so it still has some strength.
P2: this is just a pair of triangular bulkheads (teak-faced plywood) that go on either side of a central rectangular panel. The whole thing is what separates the aft cabin from the waste and fuel tanks in the stern. While I'd like to think the bottom edge of the plywood won't sit in water, I'm a realist. I fully intend to find and fix the leak that caused these panels to take up water on the bottom edge and rot. I also believe that nothing is perfect, and there's likely to be water there some time. So I don't want the new, expensive 1/4 sheet of plywood to rot immediately. It should rot slowly, and hold out until I die of natural causes at age 100.
P3: We're talking maybe 8 screws. No more.
To follow on to John's excellent "SWAG's" (?), Project 1 is the real mystery item. I've got the same boat with the same poorly designed/built anchor locker but the condition of mine is much worse. It's completely rotted through and I can easily push a screwdriver through the bulkhead from the v-berth backside into the locker. I'm going to have to tear it all out and rebuild it. I'm not suggesting you will need to do that, but I would guess that there are unseen areas of yours that are at least on their way to total collapse like mine which may need further investigation. In your second photo, the discolored cracks and voids just under the windlass platform especially just above the fiberglass cloth border are prime targets. In my locker, the rot line runs the entire width of the bulkhead and appears directly related to that fiberglass cloth border. Yours doesn't look nearly as bad, so a superficial patch job might not call for too much epoxy, but obviously if you have to start replacing sections of bulkhead (like I will
) it may call for a bit more fiberglass/epoxy.
I ordered the 5:1 epoxy quart kit from TotalBoat along with fumed silica thickener and 1708 cloth to rebuild the bottom of my rudder earlier this spring. I think this is essentially comparable to the West System 105/206/406 combo. I don't see any reason you couldn't use that for each of your projects.
Please keep us updated since each of your projects are in my not-too-distant future.
JD: yes, I remember your posts from another thread I started about my anchor locker leak. Sorry I didn't reply to them: around that time, I had to get in high gear to get all the @#$% done to launch my boat in mid-May. I had pulled the rub-rail off, and it had to go back on before launch.
My feeling is that all the evidence is pointing to my leak only being from last November until launch in mid-May. Somehow, the extreme bow-up angle they had the boat at on land caused water to run where it hadn't previously. And since launching, I've seen no water in the fore-peak, just forward of the water tank, where I had been getting a gallon in a heavy rain. So as you say, I don't think my rot runs nearly as deep as yours does. (you had a hole, as I recall?) So this is why I think maybe some layers of fiberglass on top of the mainly-intact plywood will give my anchor locker some decent strength. Maybe with yours, you could still use what's left of the floor as a mold to lay a good, strong layer of glass in there, wrapped around to anchor against the hull? As I said, I know nothing about fiberglass...
I'll certainly keep you updated, although all of these projects (except for P2, the plywood bulkheads) are sort of non-time-critical now that nothing is leaking. So it might be a couple of months.
I'll second the fact that epoxy has an amazingly long shelf life until mixed. I buy the west systems or the total boat from Jamestown Distributors (shameless plug, but they really are great to work with). I still have some of the gallon of 5:1 I purchased to do a partial re-build on some wooden kayaks and fill some holes on my sailboat several years later. In fact, just used some today to repair a door, and it worked pretty much like it did when I first opened it.
Buy more then you think you'll need and save the extra. You'll use it somewhere.
Good to know. Do you use the mini-pumps for measuring? What's 5:1?
Hi!
The timing on this is good--after a weekend of the center cabin lights leaking on my Hunter 376 I decided to tackle the "fill/re-drill the deck panel mounting holes" project (your #3).
I used West Systems 105 epoxy and 205 fast hardner and then used 407 filler to try and thicken things up a bit.
The project is going medium well (as far as boat projects go). When drilling out the holes I found that the screw holes themselves are just an approx 1/4" fiberglass with wood between then a void below. I was expecting the screws to be drilled into some form of wood channel. The challenge here is going to be that when I injected the epoxy mix into the hole it kind of "spread" in the void. I had to use a good bit of epoxy for each hole to build a pile of epoxy to get things up to the level of the hole. I'm now waiting for it to harden, so tomorrow I'll have to drill the new screw holes. I'm really hoping that it's a deep enough pile that I don't drill all the way through (which would negate the whole purpose of this project).
I'll let folks know what I find tomorrow!
What I thought I understood was that in a cored deck, you'd have a fiberglass, wood, fiberglass sandwich. So when you drill out the rotted wood, you want to leave the lower fiberglass layer intact, right? But I guess you're saying the original screws penetrated the lower fiberglass layer, hence causing not only rotting core, but a leak into the interior? So when you fill with epoxy, it's dripping down into the void, presumably on top of your headliner, I guess? I'd like to hear how it goes.
