What would you do? Bow repair.

shorefun

shorefun

Well-Known Member
This is my son's 88 Sunfish. It had a bashed area on the bow. While it is too cold to do repair work, I did grind it back to see what I had.

The course roving is still good. I was just going to lay glass over the roving and then gel coat. The guy at the club who did glass work for a living thinks I would need to remove the trim and put a backer in before laying on top. My guess is that a bunch of layers of alternating cloth and mat will create a strong bow with the original roving giving the backing strength.

I was surprised with how thick the gel coat is on the nose point. I guess that makes sense as glass likely can not make such a point. Even off the sides the gel coat was fairly thick.

This hull is about 25 lbs heavy. I do not want to make the holes in it and I was thinking of making a duct system and a small 12v fan to push air from the bow out the rear. Not sure how well that will work, but I have a few months.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_2263[1].JPG
    IMG_2263[1].JPG
    674.1 KB · Views: 40
  • IMG_2262[1].JPG
    IMG_2262[1].JPG
    616.7 KB · Views: 40
There's so little space inside to work inside the bow! :oops: I'd slap a 3x3 pad of fiberglass cloth (or tape) over what remains of the roving, and fair the bow with Marine-Tex.

Why a 12-volt fan? :confused: A small 2-inch muffin fan (of household current) can be taped to the bow. It'll work especially well if a transom drainplug can be removed for the winter—but I wouldn't install one if a drainplug doesn't exist there presently.
 
You could split the deck seam or just open up the existing hole a little more and insert and blind patch through the hull. The remnants of that roving look damaged anyway, they shouldn't be frosty looking like that.
 
The existing roving is not broken fibers. It is just the final layer of glass put down when they made the hull.

What I am not sure of is how dry it is. Keep in mind I had another hull I did a repair on with a blind hole. I noticed that one was dry, that is not well saturated and bonded to the previous layer.

I think if I just wet out this layer the next will bond well to it. I have ground back quite a bit with the idea I can lay in a few layers of glass for a good bond further out. I have done quite a bit of searching on the science of glass laying for repairs and find what people successfully do is all over the place. Everything seems to work including some repairs that look pretty poor to me. I have asked technical questions in a number of places and usually get a few people following wanting to see the answer.

So I am really thinking anything I can think up is likely going to be pretty good. Then if I mess it up I can always grind it out and do something else. So I am going to go the easy way first.
 
shorefun said:
The coarse roving is still good. I was just going to lay glass over the roving and then gel coat. The guy at the club who did glass work for a living thinks I would need to remove the trim and put a backer in before laying on top. My guess is that a bunch of layers of alternating cloth and mat will create a strong bow with the original roving giving the backing strength.

I was surprised with how thick the gel coat is on the nose point. I guess that makes sense as glass likely can not make such a point. Even off the sides the gel coat was fairly thick.

This hull is about 25 lbs heavy. I do not want to make the holes in it and I was thinking of making a duct system and a small 12v fan to push air from the bow out the rear. Not sure how well that will work, but I have a few months.
Click to expand...
Because of its coarse weave, roving "off the shelf" can't be seen through.

This "coarse", open-weave, roving appears to be factory-made.

I'll speculate here, that standard roving is too stiff to manufacture the bow.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top