Lisa Blair sailed her 15.25-meter Hick 50 into the record books this year as the fastest, non-stop, solo sailor to circumnavigate Antarctica. The wild, demanding nature of the Southern Ocean required Lisa Blair to ensure her vessel was in the best possible condition before undertaking her voyage. Equally important was provisioning the proper materials and spare parts to cover every kind of repair job on her epic voyage.
If your swim platform is experiencing water penetration, a repair or even a rebuild could be in your near future. We’ll show you how to measure the damage, and perform a successful repair that will last for years to come.
Before starting on your next fiberglass repair or boat modification, let’s look at some projects that would most-likely require you to make appropriate structural reinforcements to your boat. After all – boats are complicated structures. Sailboats endure multiple loads from the rigging as the shrouds are pulled in tension and the mast is compressed into the hull. Inboard-powered boats must transfer the thrust from the engine mounts into the stringers while outboard and sterndrive boats place substantial loads on the transom. Even the steering wheel at a stand-up helm can undergo high loads when the boat moves fast through large waves — the security of which many go-fast boaters may take for granted. Let’s dive in.
Typically, when a fastener fails on a boat, it pulls out of the wood or fiberglass that it was screwed into. There are many causes for this failure: shock loading, fatigued from being pulled on one too many times, or moisture softening the wood. Let’s take a look at how using WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy can improve the holding power of a fastener in wood to give you fewer troubles on the water.
After 20-plus years of vibration and pounding on the water, the molded plastic console on my 2001 Lund® boat was riddled with stress cracks and broken pieces. All of the fastener-mounting points were stripped out or broken. As often happens with older boat components, replacement parts were no longer available. I’d have to repair the console myself.
On the surface, the span looks like any of the thousands of small, narrow two-lane bridges across America. This new, high-tech bridge in Morgan County, Tennessee uses G/flex® Epoxy in a fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite material deck embedded with fiber optic sensors. It replaced a damaged, decades-old concrete crossing which, like thousands of low-volume bridges across the nation, was structurally deficient and outdated.
Most epoxy systems can cause skin irritation or allergic skin reactions. Hardeners can be particularly severe skin irritants and sometimes can even be moderately corrosive to skin tissue. Consequently, you should always protect your skin from epoxy with protective clothing and gloves.
I’ve been restoring an MFG 15. The transom was made up of one very thin fiberglass hull transom sandwiched between two ¾” mahogany layers and bolted together. I chose to reinforce the fiberglass transom with 12 oz. fiberglass. I also laminated the backside of each mahogany layer piece with 6 oz. fiberglass, and the front (exposed) side with 4 oz. fiberglass.
Before jumping into building a strip kayak, I wanted to find out all I could about the process. To begin, I read the book Kayakcraft: Fine Woodstrip Kayak Construction by Ted Moores cover-to-cover and referred to it frequently during construction.