Repair of weak spot near the stern

L

lambelly

New Member
Hi, I have a 1969 sunfish. Where the back of the boat meets the bottom of the boat in back has started leaking. You can see some small cracks in that area.

We're intending to try to fix that. We were uncertain if we wanted to remove the tiller bracket or not. Our hypothesis is that the drag from the tiller weakened the fiberglass over time, so we were thinking about removing the tiller bracket and reinforcing it with a piece of wood.

What would you use to try to fix it? We bought some fiberglass repair goop made by 3m. Without having seen the issue, do you think that reinforcing the tiller bracket is necessary?

Thanks for any advice.
 
I'll try to take pictures of what I'm talking about from the inside and outside of the boat. I haven't really seen it from the inside. I don't think you can see much on the outside, but it will at least help to illustrate what I'm talking about.
 
It looks like this was a rudder conversion that wasn't done well. The patch at the bottom of the stern may be the leak point but I would do a leak test first to make sure. You can find information here http://www.sunfishforum.com/content.php?pg=airtest on how to perform the test. Reinforcing the tiller bracket/gudgeon with wood is probably not a good idea.
 
danpal said:
It looks like this was a rudder conversion that wasn't done well. The patch at the bottom of the stern may be the leak point but I would do a leak test first to make sure. You can find information here http://www.sunfishforum.com/content.php?pg=airtest on how to perform the test. Reinforcing the tiller bracket/gudgeon with wood is probably not a good idea.
Click to expand...
Agreed; is there an inspection port that was used for the conversion?
If so, you can take a peek inside, but that edge between the stern and the bottom sure looks bad.
 
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