Got the floor out. The black is a mix of a little bit of oil, and a lot of rotten putrified plywood.
Check out this piece of the floor up front. Completely sludge. This was all glass, the plywood had long since turned to mud, but you could see the glass took the shape of the knots in the ply, kind of like a fossil
And then some more dissassembled photos:
And some of the rotten crud we took out:
And then here's a story. So I bought this boat about 7-8 years back, and it had outboards. It didn't raise billfish on the troll at all, so I changed it over to a cummins. I had NO idea what I was doing, still don't
, but one of the old timers told me I need 160 gallons minimum. Why a day charter fishing boat that burns 40-45 gallons of fuel would need 160 gallons is beyond me, but since I usually listen when the smart people speak, i combined the 2 side tanks with some aluminum and built what has to be the heaviest fuel tank on earth. After we built this out of aluminum using pieces of the factory tanks, we covered it in 5 layers of mat to stop the corrosion. Obviously, this is going in the garbage pile, and my new 60 gallon plastic tank is going to save a whopping 495 pound while DRY and another 700 pounds or so when full. That's over 1000 pounds just in fuel tank...
World's ugliest and heaviest fuel tank?
Also, the small plastic tank will give me the ability to ALWAYS top off my fuel tank every day. That means I won't get condensation in the tank at night when the air cools off, and my diesel will be much cleaner. All around win.
And then it was time to take out the weight that was left. I once talked with a very knowledgable boat builder that said the bottom of the boat is where you hit stuff and it needs to be thick. The sides just keep the water out. So with that in mind we decided to make the sides of the boat thinner.
Something to know about boats that were built back in the 90's, they used two molds to make them. They did the hull in a big mold, and then with this boat, they did another mold for the inside. So the walls of the boat are double layered, and are every bit as thick as the bottom. So we seperated the walls and took the inside wall out. There was actually enough glass that we took off of the side walls that we donated it to a local builder in the yard and he built a water taxi out of it, and it's big enough to hold a small car.
So after they made the outside mold and the inside mold, they used what I think is cement to stick the two together:
It looks like they used tile grout spreader to make the cement the same thickness, but they failed to get the inside skin to touch the outside skin, so you can still see the lines from the spreader. Knowing the two layers were seperated and not functioning together relieved any doubts that the inside skin is just extra weight.
The worst job in the entire world was grinding all that cement off of those walls. That was a full 60 hours of work with a 9 inch grinder and 16 grit sandpaper, but what a difference:
Before:
After:
And then of course the transom. 3 inches of rotten sludge. We got all the plywood out of it as well:
And here's an inside shot of all the cement dust on the floor after one of those days of grinding on the walls. We made a cloud that covered cars and kids for about a mile down wind:
