Well, this week is that week of the year where i take out my 1983 coldmolded Gamefishermen and start poking the bottom to see how bad we beat it up. This year I found a good one! Oh the joys of owning a wood boat! But man it raises fish, and we'll be done in about a week or less so I guess I can't complain, but man this was the worst wet spot I have seen so far...
Here's what it looked like when we took off the layer of glass on the outside:
Bill106 puts this 1700 biaxial kevlar on the bottom of his boats. This is what he prevents...I sure wish I could get that stuff here..
Anyways, so we took out the bad wood and then are opening up each layer a little bit bigger than the last. Tomorrow we will put removable jigs/ribs behind the damages spot and then put some laurel wood in there. This boat has 3 layers at 1/4 inch ish. Today i had to make a trip into the mountains to find a farmer that had laurel in the top of his barn that was dry. Anyway, here is the MASSIVE hole we made in the bottom of the boat today. This thing has a trip next Friday, this is going to be close...
And then while it's out, we are changing out some tubes in the tower. Since we don't have enough to do with the hull. But I'm really happy with how this is looking, the original tube was 1 inch and was always breaking, so I got some nice thick walled 2 inch tube from Western Extrusions in Florida (the only company that will deliver to my freight forwarder) and so we are going back with twice as thick new tubing.
And then we did a little bit of work to the Bertram Hull too. Got most of the fairing done, and then I remember that we took the mold from below the aluminum bumper, so i lost 2.5 inches. So we setup little sticks and we are going to make the mold 2.5 inches taller so it's like the original. Here's a couple pictures of that progress...
An something extra the original didn't have, we are offsetting the hull where the guides go. Should pick up at least .1 knots, right? Either way, smooth is better and it doesn't cost anything extra. I know most boats nowadays do this, but the original did not.
