Coronado15 Rebuild

you know how that first cut is....have to break inertia and get over my fear of doing it wrong... once it's cut..no problem.

 

Just to tease, I pulled the hardware off of the transom last night, and made a paper template...but, I didn't cut her open yet. Standby for more.

 

Holly smokes. What does the template do? I have a pretty good idea though. Lets see see a picture.

 

The template is just an outline of the transom, I actually need to put it back on the boat and mark the positioning of the hardware and the cockpit drains...I'll take some pic's when I do that.

 

Are you planning to cut around the cockpit drain, leaving it right where it is? The bolt holes for the rudder hardware will always be in position on the inside of the cockpit. If the wood core is really rotten then the transom skin should come off easily and in one piece. It would save a ton of work if you could put the skin back into position when the new lumber was in place.

 

I don't think I have a complete plan for the cockpit drains, but I do know that they leak terribly, so I don't think leaving them in place is an option. I do expect the skin to just pull away from the core. I also expect to be able to align things based on the inside cockpit wall, template is mostly for a "just in case" things don't go as planned.

 

Ok, I made the cuts. I'll add pictures later, but even after 5 months of he boat being in the garage. That wood was still wet. Very wet!. I'm also concerned because the last foot or so of the cockpit sole is also wet/soggy. I guess I need to clean that out too. I need to come up with a plan for that.

 

Well congrats! I'm looking forward to seeing pictures. (Sent you a private message.)

 

I was going over the boat a while back and I noticed that the gudgeons on my boat where a little wobbly. I didn’t want to risk losing my rudder at any point so I tightened them up a little bit. At the time I didn’t notice but later I found that the transom had squished together a bit and was looking somewhat concave. I had also noticed when I replaced the drain fitting below, that the wood inside the drain was wet and soft. It was at that point that I became concerned about the state of my transom.

It still seemed to have some strength and I didn’t want to deal with the problem just as weather was getting nice and we were about to put the boat to good use, so I made a temporary modification. I painted a piece of sheet metal I had laying around the garage, I drilled four holes in it and with a little 4200, secured that in place behind the gudgeons to provide some added strength. We then proceeded to use the boat for the summer.



I was still getting water down into the bilge. Quite a bit of water actually, It was my son (#4 Monkey) who noticed some gapping around the cockpit drains, with all of this evidence, I decided that the transom might be in pretty bad shape underneath that fiberglass. Since I don’t want to be out and lose my rudder (or the whole transom) and I’d like to hang an outboard off of the stern as my “get out of jail free card”. I decided to cut into the transom and see about doing this repair during the off season. This write up is what I did to actually fix the problem.

I had intended to do the repair from inside the cockpit, but after discussing with a friend and seeing some pictures online of what others had done. I decided to work from the outside. Now that I’ve cut into it, I can see many reasons why this was the way to go. The main reason is I can access the whole transom, only a small portion of it would have been accessible from the cockpit.

First I removed all of the hardware from the boat (I forgot the data plate initially). The next step was more of a just in case, I taped a large piece of paper to the transom just below the rub-rail and used a crayon to mark the edges. I wanted to have a template of the shape on hand.


Once that was completed I grabbed a piece of scrap 1x2 laying around the garage and used it to make a mark around 1 ½ “ from the edges of the boat, I actually came down that distance from the rub rail as well.

Once I had the shape of the cutout marked. I used my pneumatic cutting wheel to “follow the lines”. This produced a pretty nasty dust so I made sure to wear my goggles and dust mask.





I didn’t want to cut too deep at first; I just wanted to see if the outer skin would peel away.

I could tell it was loose for the most part, so I ended up cutting through the wood core as well just because.



In some places I stopped using my cutting wheel and used my oscillating tool. It was easier to control and actually made less noise than my compressor trying to keep up with demand of the cutting wheel. Either tool would have been fine to complete the task at hand though.

Once I had the transom cut free, I still needed to remove the brass drains. I used a pair of lineman’s pliers to "unfold" the outside flared edge and just pushed it through into the cockpit. I now had the rear of my boat wide open.



And the fiberglass skin that I removed was still in tact.



What I found was that the wood core was soaked. Keep in mind the boat has been in my garage and not in the water for at least 5 months. The transom was WET! And the layers just completely separated. I reached in to feel around a bit, only to find that the wood core beneath the floor of the cockpit is also soaked and rotting. I can feel about 12” of that plywood before I get to the foam I inserted just before last summer as part of the bulkhead project. Some of that foam was going to have to come out so I could access the cockpit “sub-floor”.



There’s no pretty way to describe pulling this foam out from the stern. I had epoxied the pieces together when I put it in, which I now regret. I pretty much had to cut, rip hack and pull on this foam to get it out and I made a huge mess in the process. I even got some of those lovely scrapes on my arms that only fiberglass can give. I finally got about 4 feet worth of foam out, which is further into the boat than I can reach from back here. It turns out that as far as I can reach, the wood is wet.



I’ll have to see how easily it separates from under the floor, and come up with a plan for how I will replace what I can access. I can say that the first 12" came off with very little effort. I suspect depending on what tool I come up with to help, the next 3 feet will do the same.

 

Wow, the forum changed. Had to reset my password. Not sure if you started the rebuild, I was out of town for a week.
The last PM I sent might have gone missing with the forum reboot. You mentioned something like "where do I start this thing?"

Well,,,You could do worse than to start by rebuilding the cockpit sole. You will need cloth (not tape,) new core, epoxy and thickened epoxy.
Clean all the bonding surfaces with sand paper and then start putting it all together. Flip the hull for this.

After that's done, decide what you want to do with those foam stringers. Pulling that junk out and replacing with new would be easy enough at this point and if it were my hull I'd put an extra stringer right down the middle (from the drain plug to the center board trunk.) If that centerboard trunk "knee" is rotten then get rid of it (this work might be easier to do before the cockpit sole is finished because you'll have about 1/2'' more space.) You might consider doing the knee demolition first and then sanding down everything (hull and cockpit) because you'll be at "max work space" then start the build up. (In any sequence of events I think you'll have enough space.)

When that's all done I want to talk about those disintegrated cockpit stringers. I got an idea for those too.

 

This is the type prefabricated stringer that might be perfect for your project. Three 4 foot sections (2 sections might work,) or whatever you decide. Wet them out on a sheet of plastic (on the floor) and then slide them into position.

 

A 4 foot length is $7.50
Prisma Composite Preforms Hull Stiffener https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/show_product.do?pid=57774&familyName=Prisma+Composite+Preforms+Hull+Stiffener

 

This style is available in various heights and widths.
Prisma Composite Preforms Hull Beams https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/show_product.do?pid=57770&familyName=Prisma+Composite+Preforms+Hull+Beams

 

This is the general idea just on a smaller scale.

 

Hey those are pretty slick. Are you thinking I'd run them just along the edges of the sole? Where the old rotting wooden ones extend down from? 4 Feet is a good length. This is where it would be if I was doing it forward...so same thing except it would be aft. I just don't have a good picture of back there.