Replacing a rotten boat deck is a fairly common task, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.
Hopefully, when you bought your boat you gave it a thorough pre-purchase inspection and didn ’ triiodothyronine get any nasty surprises. But if you buy a fixer-upper or have an older boat you love and don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate want to separate with, there ’ s a fair chance you ’ ll need to replace character or all of the rotten boat deck at some steer. Although more and more boats are all-composite these days, the manipulation of plywood in the deck was a standard boatbuilding procedure for decades. As a leave, there are batch of saggy, spongy rotten decks out there. The beneficial newsworthiness : you don ’ t have to freak out at the prospect of fixing it. Rotten deck refilling is a straightforward job that barely about any competent do-it-yourself can tackle. We ’ ll break it down into the five basic steps :
Cut out the honest-to-god decayed deck or section of deck that ’ s decayed. As a indicate of reference, you can plan on this taking about four hours with two workers, to remove the deck on an 18-foot center comfort. You ’ ll need a sabre see, crowbar, malleus, chisel, pick, and a drill with screw bits. Most of your initial make will be with the saw, cutting around the perimeter of the deck. Set the see sword by beginning drilling a hole in the rotten gravy boat deck and using a probe to measure its thickness. Whatever you do, don ’ t omission this stage – you don ’ thyroxine want to cut besides deep and if you fail to set the see blade correctly, and you could saw mighty through bulkheads or even the hull in some spots. Ripping up the old, decayed wood is easy once it ’ mho cut spare, but you ’ ll likely find some areas where pieces need to be chipped away from fiberglass putty on the stringers and/or bulkheads with the forge and cheat. A more boring job is using the hammer and pick to chip fiberglass resin out of screw heads that secured the deck, so the driver bite can get a bite and you can remove the old fasteners .
Cut fresh marine plywood to fit. In the case of a square mend, this is no big hand, but if you ’ re doing an entire decayed boat deck, matching radiuses around the bow can be challenging. It took a friend and me eight hours on the 18-footer. The tools we needed included a measure tape, circular examine, fasteners, fiberglass resin, fiberglass putty, and a drum sander and sandpaper .
Before screwing down the wood, first, paint the bottom with a slurred coating of resin to help protect against moisture. And while you ’ re at it, besides paint any newly-exposed stringers or bulkheads where you spot unprotected woodwind, to help stave off future bunk in those pieces-parts.
Use fiberglass putty to bed the deck along stringers and bulkheads and then screw the deck in position. Fill the seams with more fiberglass putty, let it harden, and then sand until the stallion deck is flush and placid .
looking glass in the deck, with at least two layers of fiberglass. This takes two workers about six hours and requires rolls of fiberglass fabric, fiberglass resin, rouge brushes, and rollers, mixing tubs, measuring cups, and six million pairs of latex gloves. actually – you just can ’ t have enough .
Laying on the glass international relations and security network ’ triiodothyronine adenine unmanageable as one might think, but there are some very specific instructions you need to follow when mixing the resin and wetting out the fabric. The problem is that if you make one little mistake you can botch the integral problem and have to go back to the drawing board. We could write an entire bible on the subject ( it ’ second been done, hundreds of times ) but rather we ’ ll offer these two invaluable tips : beginning, read the resin/hardener mixing directions cautiously and use measured amounts, not best-guesses. Second, go to YouTube and watch a few video on laying down fiberglass and wetting it out. then take a sample distribution chunk of ply and fiberglass it, to get a tactile property for how the fabric acts when dry and after being wet. At each stage, it ’ randomness quite unlike, and a small bit of have goes a long way.
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When replacing a piece of decayed deck, homework ( sand and clean ) the fiberglass surfaces a couple of inches beyond the animate itself so you can overlay the looking glass around the edges. When replacing a deck correct up to the gunwales you may want to run putty around the edges to create a radius, because fiberglass hates astute angles and laying a neat 90-degree turn is extremely difficult .
final surface application. You can make this phase in truth easy, and it will only take a few hours if you cheat a act – consumption a kit. On our rebuild, we used Rhino Lining, but there are a number of products you can get like Tuffcoat Marine and KiwiGrip which both have excellent reputations. All versions offer a wide rate of colors and surfaces which can be sprayed, brushed, or rolled onto the fiberglass.
Surface homework took us a half-hour, as did painting on the fuse. Rolling out the Rhino Hide took another half-hour per coat ( three coats entire ) and was no unlike than rolling on paint. When the surface dried we were absolutely thrilled with it ; the count and feel of the liner was flush better than the original gray-and-black spackle eat up, the surface is angstrom grippy as any you ’ ll discover, and dropping a six-ounce lead fishing weight doesn ’ triiodothyronine chip or damage it .
The clean-up phase. This may be a moment more involve than expected because when you ’ re done with that rotten gravy boat deck you ’ ll have to get rid of a huge stack of moldy, delaminated plywood and fiberglass. even doing the little 18-footer, we filled the bed of a Toyota Tacoma and had to spend time cutting a few pieces down to make them fit .
concenter on the caper and get a friend or two to help, and you can replace the icky boat deck on a modest boat or patch a larger one up in a single weekend. naturally, if you ’ re replacing the entire deck on a larger boat you ’ ll need to allow for more time. But in the long run, this job international relations and security network ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate closely angstrom tough as many people think. And once it ’ randomness complete, you ’ ll have a spirit of complacency every time you stand on that deck and cast the gat, crank the virginia reel, or swing the gaff .
