Rotten Bulkhead - Help!!

put a block in to help tension on the joint

 

Back block.. what wood

To make things look somewhat nice, I need to stay with half inch wood of some sort. Most lumber yards around me have half inch pine that is about the right size for what I need. Is pine an ok wood for back blocking or not? I can buy an entire piece of regular 1/2in ply but I dont need it, nor do I have the wood tools to cut sizes I need. ???

Jose

 

Pine is too soft, search out someone with a thickness planer and mill some mahoghany. It lasts longer and will have more dimensional stabilty. If you look closely we installed one outboard of the exhaust both sides of the new ply wood, Even after we glassed the joint. It never hurts to over do the structural part of any repair. You can see that we installed a mini bulkhead (its sitting on the floor of the salon, upper right) this is installed forward of the muffler/exhaust pipe connection to prevent the inaccessable muffler from failing down if a strap breaks (AGAIN)....damn thing already broke, folded the rubber hose in half and caused way to much back presssure

 

An inaccesable muffler is not a good idea. The hose eventually rots, especially if overheated. The "stainless" clamps rust, decay and fall off. That big of an underwater hole in your boat needs to be watched. Sam

 

Exactly Sam

that why I redesigned the cockpit area and all of the supports to allow us to repair everything. The new support has lots of openings to reach my grubby hands into or through. Its great now. Even though Im tall dark and ,, oops thats another site; I could crawl in and fix everything. The white bilge paint is a fantastic difference from gray so a quick inspection with these old eyes is very easy

 

Almost done with the repair..

Well.. I glassed over the joint with 4 layers of glass on one side, and back blocked on the other side. I epoxied the joint on the back block side, then laid epoxy down on the new and old wood, and then screwed it all down. Lots of work but it looks pretty good and hopefully will be strong. I think it will be. The bulk of the work is done. Now just put back together...

Jose

 

find a good wholesaler for stainless, I think we put over 2000 screws into the boat.