- Hull -

Deconstruction

Much of the old wooden floor came up well. Up til this point, I was under the impression that I would get the floor up and simply perform repairs to the stiffening web. The innovative design, for the time, chop strand tub/hull liner was built up over a separate mold then bonded into the freshly laid up hull. In concept, great idea. The purpose of this structure, trade named the “stiffening web” was designed to reinforce the structure while keeping the number of parts to a minimum. However, the longevi..

Unfortunately, the web had been blown apart throughout the boats life. It's hard to say how long the floor lasted before it was damaged to this degree. The structure sustained repeated impacts causing the top of nearly each tunnel to break at the radius - the weak-point. Looking back, with how long the designers anticipated these boats to last. I can safely say; however, this sort of thing was inevitable. 

It was evident that the floor/web structure had been subjected to a life-time and a half of choppy water and stomps as most of the web was cracked along the crown of each tunnel. See diagram for square wave cross section. 

Pressing forward, with most of the floor and bow shelf cut, it exposed the rest of the wet sections of the hull. Before any work could be started, I needed to dry out the hull completely. This left me with a few days to think about the avenue i was going to take.

...duration of rough teardown - 1 week. This would ultimately take much longer as I carefully carved back the edges of the floor where it met the side of the hull - careful not to dam