Cape Islander Rebuild

Starting on a new project. I have an older glass over wood Cape Island Boat. Wood is mostly saturated and bad on her bottom. The plan is to pull most of the wood out, thicken up the fibreglass and reframe her as a purely glass hull looking for any suggestions you might have.

 

Sounds fraught to me, you pull out wood, and have nothing to hold things in shape, and I can't see how you can replace frames and substitute stringers for the wood planking, without making a supporting cradle to sit the boat in, first. Do you propose to pile the glass on the outside, first ? Otherwise it would be even more difficult.

 

You really need to take some pictures. The wood is the hull; you can't just remove it all.

 

one thing I should mention is when wood was glassed over they got a little over board. There is roughly 8 -10 mm of glass. Keel is good and everything above the water line it in good shape.

 

Just trying to visualize how this would be done . . . basically you are going to end up with a fiberglass shell once the wood is removed (right?) the cockpit/cabin/foredeck will probably have to be taken out along with the wood hull and structure (right).

Things to think about . . .

Can you remove the wood without destroying the fiberglass? Even wet, assume that a lot of the wood hull will have a strong grip in the fiberglass

Is this really going to be worthwhile or even possible?

You will basically be rebuilding the boat in an inefficient manner.

Maybe try a small area, remove the wood, and see how it goes.

Maybe see if you can get the fiberglass to come off of the wood (rather than the wood off of the fiberglass) and you will have a fiberglass shell to build a boat from.

 

Wood below waterline is totally rotten and has zero hold on glass. You can literally vacuum the wood off the glass. I have already done a small test area. There’s quite a few boats here in my area that have had this done to them. Basically I’m going to start at the stern and make my way forward in 60” sections. Boat will be supported in a cradle. One interesting note, the Motor is midship and underneath it for an 8 foot section all the wood was already remove and replaced with thicken Fiberglass hull and Glass ribs

 

A 60" section is actually a nightmare size....too wide for hands and knees lamination...trust me

 

One way to do it, would be to create a sandwich using the existing glass skin as the inner laminate, then remove the timber afterwards.

 

You mean to flip her or lay the exterior?

That would add fairing to the list.

The best way would be one meter wide fabric inside, stagger all joins 50mm and up the sides. The right fabric makes the job easy; wrong makes it a nightmare.

Working inside the hull with epoxy would reduce fumes, but drive cost. You could also stay in primary bonding and sleep if the boat is big.

At least the wood isn't a core.

 

The use for the crib will just be to keep her for stable while I thicken up the Hull. Boat weighs in around 5000 kg with about 2000 of that in water soaked into wood. at 32 ft I won’t be moving her around or tipping her over on her side. It’s going to be a lot of slow going and figured out solutions as we go lol. I have a friend down the road for me who is a expert on Fiberglass and boat structure so I’ll be talking a lot with him

 

I have a picture of hand laminating inside a hull. The trouble is you need to reach over the wet laminate to roll it out and consolidate it, but nowhere to lean. A 38" fabric would be nice, and one you can wet in place.

In the picture, you'll see my glass sections are actually half sections of 51" wide fabric. That is more ideal as you can reach it fairly easy. The designer spec'd double glass on the bottom and we did a single on the table on each side and hand laid the second layer to the dwl with some weight penalty. Hopefully it will pay off..