Are these damages bad?

Yeltzin

New Member
Hi there!!
Just bought a laser 2 hours ago.. and now when i came home i checked it up closer..
It's from the 70's so both old and cheep, but the cracks i found, how bad are they?
The boat is dry after a test-sail..

These damages in the front are the only i can find on the whole boat, and is there a way to glue the front where it starts to open up?
damages.jpg
 
Hi there!!
Just bought a laser 2 hours ago.. and now when i came home i checked it up closer..
It's from the 70's so both old and cheep, but the cracks i found, how bad are they?
The boat is dry after a test-sail..

These damages in the front are the only i can find on the whole boat, and is there a way to glue the front where it starts to open up?View attachment 9626


Looks fairly typical for a boat that old...Years of bumping into stuff. not much to worry about if the hull is dry.
Turn the boat over.
Take out all the old, damaged material from the joint between the hull and deck molding leaving a gap (Dremmel or similar rotary tool is good for this)
Take out as much as you need to until everything remaining is firm and free of cracks. It will look a lot worse after this..........
Clean the void with acetone then fill the channel by pouring in thickened epoxy resin.
Good as new....It may last another 40 years.
Don't worry about the gel coat cracks on the bow, you could spend hours trying to repair them and they'll reappear the first time you hit something.
Go sailing instead.
 
Good advice ...... I'd even dispense with the Dremel and just pour epoxy glue into the gap. painters tape outside and inside the lip then sand smooth when dry.

I just made some spider crazing cracks disappear on my hull with a little auto body Bondo, high build primer (sanding between coats), and found a very close paint match. But you will never match the paint color perfectly so have to weigh leaving it like it is or live with the slight color variation.
 
as Fat-n-old said the boat is fine you could repair it like he said which would be the proper reccomendable thing to do but if you aren't bothered about it you could just leave it as long as you store the boat with a cover on it to stop the UV getting at the fibreglass itll be fine
 
as Fat-n-old said the boat is fine you could repair it like he said which would be the proper reccomendable thing to do but if you aren't bothered about it you could just leave it as long as you store the boat with a cover on it to stop the UV getting at the fibreglass itll be fine

The split between the deck and hull needs to be fixed, otherwise it's going to leak like crazy in any thing other then flat water conditions.
 
+1 what 49208 said, if you sail in waves you'll leak like crazy, its a pretty simple fix, make sure you clean it out really well

while you're at it, you should give the boat a quick leak test, there might be other leaks along the seam, bailor, fittings ect
 
Odds are good it doesn't leak thropugh thopse cracks.

Yes. I would flip the boat over and dribble in some thinned polyester resin, and probably rebuild teh shape with some thickened resin , probably with some chopped up glass mixed in ( or some 3 M High Strength Blister filler.

No way I would use any epoxy. If I did that I couldn't repair it with color matched gelcoat and blend it in to look like brand new.

But odds are I would quit after dribbling in the thinned resin and sail teh boat until it became too mushy to have any more fun and then take it to teh dump and buy another throw away piece of class legal junk.
 
When I did this I cleaned out the area where the deck separated and then put in West System Epoxy. It is only under and inside the boat so when your done, it looks like new.
 

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