Sunday Beach Restoration

Finally started to take her apart. I'll be removing and replacing one piece at a time to minimize any chance of warping the frame. I'm working in this order: Remove old plywood, sand, fix or replace rotten wood, fill holes, prime frame, scarf plywood, epoxy plywood, attach plywood to frame. I'll repeat this for all four segments of the boat.

Removing the old plywood:

Pretty easy really, I set my router to a depth just shy of going through the rotted plywood and cut out sections of the original hull. I could have tried to save the piece for a template but it was too rotted and I was worried about warping the frame by pulling off the whole sheet. I cut the next piece a few inches into the segment to allow room for getting the new piece fitted. I'm really glad that the plywood held up as well as it did, it really preserved most of the frame with a few exceptions.

Sand:

I do most of my sanding next to my neighbor's house. I'm sure they are less than pleased. I'm toying with the idea of creating a frame to hold the boat that I can wheel around. 80/100 grit gets everything and is recommended for the primer.

Fix or replace rotten wood:

I'm using a product called Git Rot. I had never used this before but it's a pretty cool. It's a two part mixture (3:1) that, when injected into rotting wood, soaks the wood and hardens it so that it's no longer spongy and rotten. Git rot is a bit hard to mix inside the syringe (which I did) so I would recommend something else (it requires a minute of shaking, so it got all over the place... not ideal). As far as replacing the rotting wood, I'm going to wait until the plywood is on so I don't jeopardize the integrity of the frame by messing around with removing a piece.

Fill holes:

I'm using bondo because its relatively cheap and ,being the owner of many shitty cars, am very familiar with using it. I just fill the screw holes and small rotten pockets with the stuff just so no voids were left in the wood. This is as far as I got this week, I'll be moving onto the primer next week.