Fiasco 2.0 - An Epic Tale of Repair - Part 1

Fiasco 2.0 – An Epic Tale of Repair (Part 1 of 2)

So, if you haven’t heard yet through a major international news outlet – I had a bit of a hitch with our inaugural sail for our beautifully restored beach cat “Fiasco”.

Click here for the Fiasco.

Now it’s time to repair the horrific damage to both hulls. The starboard hull sported a nasty looking 4-1/2′ gash along the inboard side, ripping completely through the outer skin – and delaminating a huge area around it. The area above the gash was very, very soft. I wasn’t sure it was fixable.

Here you can see the foam beneath the outer skin…

There was also a compression crack in the gelcoat toward the stern…

As you can tell by all the deep scratches that weren’t there before…it was nasty.

There was only one thing to do…start sanding! First, I fetched the Dremel to take care of the rip itself…

Next, I feathered it back roughly 12:1 with a belt sander to prep it for glassing, and drilled holes in the outer skin for the epoxy injection to tie it all back together, and taped everything off.

Finally, the boys and I glassed up some backing plates on wax paper. These were to be glued under the outer skin so the new glass over the gash would have something solid to grab beneath…

With the backing plates in, it was on to the glassing. We pushed in a good amount of epoxy between the skin and the foam, glassed over the gash with 3 layers (making a total of 5 layers with the backer plate) – then we put on some weight to hold everything in since there had been a pretty significant bulge where the delam had happened…

After that set up, it was time to do the epoxy injection to fix the delam…

(Interesting Note: When I pulled the outer skin away from the foam, I could see what appeared to be small holes in the foam which had allowed allow an epoxy bridge between the outer and inner skins during the build of the hull. So this drill/inject method just seemed to be doing the exact same thing. This means, I think, that it’s not so much about filling the whole space with epoxy – unless the foam core is completely deteriorated – but just re-creating the epoxy ties between the two skins that have broken down over time. In any case…it worked like a charm.)