| 1975 Dufour 27
Refit | Thursday, October 16, 2008 I spent the morning, again, with the usual wash, sand, and fill routine on the hull and decks. I sanded yesterday's filled areas with 80 and 120 grit paper on a random orbit finishing sander in most areas, since with two coats of filler most spots were becoming close to their final profile. With coarser paper and a more aggressive tool, I sanded the larger patches in the cockpit, including the compass holes that had received their new fiberglass yesterday, and the back sides of the other larger patches. With the sanding complete, I once again cleaned up the dust and debris, solvent-washed as needed, and applied another coat of filler material. With most of the smaller deck repairs nearly complete, I switched fill materials, this time using Alexseal fairing compound, a smooth, fine, gray material that was best for filling the small depressions and pinholes that remained from the microballoons I used for the previous fill. With some of the fine filler left over, I used it to begin the fairing process on the two compass holes in the bulkhead, but switched back to microballoons for a second coat of filler on the large rectangular patch at the aft end of the cockpit. Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph the various filled areas after sanding and cleaning, but you know what that looks like. Here they are following the application of the Alexseal filler. |
|
|
|
Most of the hull repairs were complete, since the bulk of the work had dealt with the simple hole-filling of the old fastener holes for the rubrail, and which areas were now complete. However, the transom still required additional work, mainly to continue the filling process of the old "handholds" at the top edge. Here, I ground down the fiberglass from yesterday, then applied some of the Alexseal filler; I also applied the filler to the aft edge of the deck laminate at the top of the transom, where I'd previously begun forming a rounded edge; the raw laminate required the usual minor filling. |
|
|
|
I continued work on the deck hatch repairs, picking up where I left off yesterday. There were two additional hatches from which I needed to remove the core, and, following the same process as on the first one, I removed the inner skins and old foam core from within. The core itself, other than some disintegration from being overly flexed during the years, was in sound condition, but had simply debonded from--or never been properly bonded to--the top skins, leading to the softness and other damage that occurred as a result. With all the cores removed, I ground the underside of the top skins to remove remaining core, and scraped and sanded the remaining bits of core out from beneath the flanges remaining around the edges. Then, I ground down the edges of the flange to re move gelcoat and prepare the areas for eventual new material. Unfortunately, the replacement core material that I'd expected for delivery today didn't arrive (it turned out it was backordered when the ordering page had indicated it was in stock), so this left me with nothing further to do on the hatches--or the rest of the boat--on this day, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon working on an unrelated project in the shop. |
|
|
|
|
|
