Sailboat renovation

Replacing the rotten wood

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago we found another leakage (click HERE) that we thought was in one of the hatches and the water had found is way down to the plywood below where it got stuck due to the styrofoam placed on the plywood. As mentioned in the other post our hull is sandwich material, but the core is not wooden in the structural parts of the hull. And from the aft cabin a part of the hull can be seen, as the deck continues in under the cockpit. The cockpit is then kind of built on top of the hull. Hard to explain, but the point is that we can feel the edge of the hull and it feels really strong.

To the left – a part of our deck and to the right – our hull below waterline. The red part is just plastic (according to some documentation we found the outer part of the sandwich hull is classified as strong enough for this boat), then a synthetic core material and finally a last layer of plastic. So it is pretty thick hull.

But the more we have started removing the rotten wood we have found weaknesses and also the leakage, or at least one of them. The leakage is in the starboard hatch in the cockpit wall and right next to our starboard winch and a mooring bollard. And at some attachments the plastic is really, really thin. So we will not only repair the leakage but also reinforce this part. On port side we don’t seem to have the same issue, but maybe we will do some reinforcements there as well, just in case.

Working on removing the rotten wood in the roof in the aft cabin.
Rotten wood, as you might imagine, the smell was pretty bad…
It was also very wet and we are working hard to get this part dry with a temporary fix for the leakage (duct tape, yay!) and using a cabin heater.

Some water had also found its way down to the wall between one of our big hatches in the cockpit and the aft cabin. Probably some water had been standing in that hatch and made the wall between rot. There was an old drainage hole into the storage under the aft bed that was sealed. We removed the rotten part of the wall to replace with new fresh wood. We also drilled a new drainage hole from the storage hatch but this time we drilled it in direction towards the bilge instead of into the storage.

Removing the rotten part of the wall between one of the storage hatches under the seat in the cockpit.
Bye bye, rotten piece!

We cut the beam that followed the hull further up and the wall it self below so that the cut wouldn’t be at the same place. This way it becomes stronger, which will be good even though this is not what holds the boat together.

Making new pieces.
The beam in position, seen from inside the aft cabin.
Same, but this time seen from the hatch in the cockpit. Here you can see that the beam was cut further up than the wall. If you look really closely you can see the new drainage hole in the corner at the bottom.
Now we just need to paint this wall to make it look nicer and to protect it.

Will try to make a new blog post soon again, we have been pretty busy with a lot of stuff and also we mostly been finishing the interior work, so not so much new stuff anyway. We are very, very soon finished with that so at that point we will have some before and after pictures to show and we will also start with other jobs.

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