Coronado15 Rebuild

Not a bad idea. I've had that drain out a couple of times, and I'd hesitate to say it was 1 inch. They have all different sizes of dowels at Lowes, you could easily find the right thing.

 

so, I opened it up as described, in spite of pending snow.... Rebar fits and I can move it around pretty good but just trying to push the foam with the end just stabs into the wet foam. It doesn't budge the "block" at all. On another note, I don't think my transom is in very good shape. I feel exposed wet rotting wood all in and around that hole....:-( Where's the part where this starts getting better?

 

Keep the drain plug out, and the wood will start to dry. That foam has to go.

 

When it's out, you'll have a good look at the condition of your transom.

 

I don't put the plug in, unless boat is in the water of course.. but now I've also pulled the stainless "sleeve".. I'm keeping it out for now until I get a full picture of what I'm up against. I'm gonna make a dedicated effort to eradicate the wet foam this weekend.. I've got some ideas about making a "shredder" out of my hammer drill so I can get that foam chewed up.. and vac'd out. I'll make sure to take pictures of whatever crazy tool I come up with.

 

pictures



the punctures I could easily grind out, and fiberglass in, but the concave hull shape where it should be convex makes me believe there is a lot of structural work needed to be done inside the hull. My first thought of removing the entire top deck/cockpit area may not be possible.

look forward to any advice or experience anyone has had with C15 structural repairs.

Don

 

Wow dfye55, that hull is smashed pretty good. I honestly don't think it's possible to separate the deck and hull.

You have absolutely nothing to lose by trying though. I hope you got that thing for close to free.

Do you know how it got damaged?

 

Was it used in one of those stock car races where the race car has to tow a boat?

Just kidding. Those picture are pretty good. Looks like there is a coat of old paint on it.

 

Big news! The Foam is out! More to follow!

 

Congratulations on that! I've been wanting to give you this file, about bulkhead installation. Although this does not show the whole technical story, it is a heads up that the bulkhead (plywood) should probably not lay directly against the hull.

Some people put a thin strip of foam (weather stripping) between the hull and the panel. This prevents a hard spot and "bleed through." Meaning, the hard edge will make an imprint on the outside of the hull. It happened to me and I'm in the process of slowly removeing the bulkhead I installed (witch was way over done.)

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/at...1970s-reinell-floating-stringers-byyb-355.jpg

Your getting close to that point and you'll probably want to start with bulkheads that are furthest aft. But probably still some stuff to do before then.

 

As I left you all hanging, #4 and I were hard at work trying to figure out how to remove the water logged foam from our boat. Even though #4 is small, he still couldn’t get that foam to budge. We tried jamming the foam with rebar through the drain plug in the stern.. That seemed to yield no results except to get our rebar wet. So I conceived of and fabricated this tool to just simply shred the foam so that it could be vacuumed out with the trusty shop vac.


The tool did it’s job well, except for the fact that #4 didn’t feel comfortable with the big hammer-drill we were using to power the “shredder”, and the diameter of the shredder quickly became an issue. That tight space just didn’t have the clearance for our device.
We went back to the drawing board, and soon after came up with the device to be known as the “Foam Annihilator”.



The “Foam Annihilator” was great at it’s job at shredding foam and it fit down in there just fine unfortunately, it soon became too short for the task. We then affixed the reciprocating saw blade to the end of a piece of rebar to get some extra length on it, but when the rebar didn’t fit in the drill it was a slower more manual process. Somewhere about this time, #4 noticed that the foam on the port side of the boat was askew.. he crawled in there and pulled it right out! Somehow, we had knocked it loose and it just came out in one large chunk, nests and all...



This brought about the #4 happy dance.. Seriously, I’ve never seen a 9 year old more excited about this kind of work. But needless to say it was a big win, and he’s worked very hard for me down there…. So what you can’t see is that that foam was almost dripping it was so wet and heavy…
Not to rest on our Laurels, we put our enthusiasm of this victory to work and started to get medieval on the starboard foam. We decided to try a new tack.. instead of shredding the foam we wanted to go back to find a way to push the whole block out.. we final decided to make a “pusher” out of wood and rebar... seen in this photo here.




I fed a fish-tape through the drain plug in the transom, forward towards #4 who then duck taped the handle to the fish-tape so that I could draw it back out through the drain plug handle first.. Once I had the handle through I could get the block of wood well positioned behind the foam. I really leaned into it. and sure enough that block of foam broke free..



We were left with a considerable mess, lots of little foam pieces which were vaccumed out. Unfortunately, it is pretty dark back in there, I think exacerbated by the fact that it’s still pretty wet, extremely wet. So I can't see how wet or damaged things are.

One of the things we got out with the vacuum was a piece of one of the stringers that has broken off. it was soaked. I don’t think it could have been more wet if I’d left it out in the rain for a week. It was practically dripping.

I have some pictures but even though I bought a new work light, I can’t really see all the way to the transom in my iphone pictures. I’ll have to improve on these, because I really need the pictures to be clear to evaluate what is going on inside. That said, I think in some of these photo’s you can see a color change from light to dark, which ss where I think the wet foam was and wet wood now remains.. hopefully that will dry out now In short order.







Also, for waiting so patiently for this writeup.. Here’s a slightly blury photo of the piece I removed where the top of the compression post was adhered to the cockpit sole, (just below the step)..





If I can get some better pictures showing the entire inside lit up, I'll post them. in the meantime, I'm going to start working on my design for a new compression post and trying to figure out how to do my bulkheads so they don't press through the hull.

That's all for now.

 

Makes sense about floating the panels and distributing the exerted pressure on the bulkhead out through the tabs. Any thoughts on using this closed cell foam tape around the edges of the panels?

http://www.homedepot.com/p/MD-Build...C-_-NavPLPHorizontal1_rr-_-NA-_-100353461-_-N

I also noticed in that thread about the floating stringers, that original stringers were only tabbed on one side.. as much as I'd like to only tab one side (the easily accessible side) it would seem that tabbing both sides would be stronger and would distribute the pressures better... unless I'm missing something.

 

After some reading, it was my take that it doesn't matter to much what type of foam is used. Closed cell won't soak up water right? (Sounds right.)

I'm going to venture a guess and say that the "spacer" should be fairly thin.

Wow, that's a lot of work. Not sure where to start.

OK, just checked out that link. A half inch seams a bit thick,,,1/4 inch might be better. The strength of the bulkhead comes in part to it's bond with the epoxy and the tape. Where there is foam, there is no adhesion between the plywood and the epoxy.

 

You now what I mean? The same width as the bulkhead, but not so tall. After all it's probably a small issue. You really welded up that stainless steel?

 

No I didn't weld up the stainless... it's a grout mixer from Home depot.. I used a sawzall and cut off the end...and it's not stainless just chromed.

Check out what I found last night in this great book I bought on Amazon.. The book is Sailboat Hull and Deck Repair by Don Casey... It has a ton of good stuff in it for such a small book.