BYYB Forums

hey adla. i have the boat on its side and have had a chance to inspect the keel more closely and i have discovered that it has a lot of cracks due to the long period of time that the wood has been exposed to the elements. many small ones and a few giant ones. i could see it becoming an ongoing problem similar to your experience so i plan to pull all of the stops now so i will hopefully not have to think about it after the boat is launched. we talked about how you filled the voids with raw epoxy but i don't remember the details about how many coats of un thickened epoxy you applied to the keel. i will have to thicken the epoxy for the final run to address the grand canyons that reside in the wood but i want to be sure that i do it as well as you did. your experience has made you a veteran. :wink: so far the first coat has pennetraited into the wood pretty well and there are not nearly as many opened cracks as before.

Aaron -

I was able to fill all the voids in the lay up (the wood itself didn't check or crack until it got wet and then it did) with unthickened epoxy- nope with epoxy and a little 404 filler it was just so damned hot this summer when I did it that it ran like unthickened epoxy .... I would try to use gravity or turn the boat such that gravity is on your side for this repair. Sorry about the keel but I bet it fairs much better than mine did because it was at one point glued up properly...I can't remember the guy's name but he was a engineer or something and glued the crap out of the keel. Vegas heat is murder on stuff...the boat was never in direct sunlight except for the end of the keel where the bowsprit goes...but it is HOT and dry here...just DON't GLASS IT. And I used a power planer on the keel edge to get a fair curve.


a.