Not much of an update. Motors at the motor man. Boats still at the glass man. He cut the skin off the transom last night and on the starboard side he started at the top and when he got to the chine water began to run out. Made it sound like a substantial amount. He then went along the bottom of the hull cutting and said water just kept coming out. He hasn't got the skin free of the wood yet but he pulled the top away and the wood is definitely shot. It's delaminating like crazy and is flaky.

Supposed to get the skin off tonight and try and figure where all the water is from. He cut the port side all the way down to the plug first, and not a drop of water came out. Seems something made a sort of pocket in the starboard side that it collected in. Just praying when he gets it out that the stringers and foam are ok.

Ummmm ... What is he cutting? The inside or the outside skin? The transom has a curve to it.. slight, but it's there. That's why most that cut the skin cut the inside one to maintain the curve.

He's cutting the outside. I questioned this also and he assures me it will be right. Said he's done a bunch of V's. Said something about using 3 layers of 1/2" instead of 2 layers of 3/4 to get the curve back. We shall see. He guarantees his work for life as long as I don't go drilling holes in the transom so if something is wrong he will fix it.

hey squids, any chance u can get some photos. i know the guy doesn't want u hovering over him with a camera, but shots of whats under there might help some of us in the future.
thanks

Yea I'm supposed to get pics along the way.

Also got contacted today by the motor man. All looks well in the motor as far as the crank and block. He suggested new, oversized pistons. I told him he knows best and do whatever he wanted. Hopefully that'll be back together next week as well as my transom. Would love to have her in the water for Labor Day.

Well my glass guy has been feeling bad since it's been so hot so I went over to help get it going. Got the skin off and wow the smell. It was bad. Had some dry wood in high places but probably 85% was wet. It would seem someone put a full new transom with the 20" dropped area at some time. Then later someone put a section to build it up to hold the 25" motor.

http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...pstd1c2vka.jpg
You can see the rectangle section at the top where they updated the transom to 25". The inner piece of wood was cut exactly to the shape of the dropped section. The the outer piece was cut a bit bigger to overlap the seam.

I suspect it's not the original transom as it was cut about 2" smaller than it needed to be. Then they had some sort of hard rubbery material filling the void from the edge of the wood and the side of the hull. None of the wood had been laminated together and the 2 sheets were put together with crown staples. I'm highly doubt that Wellcraft did that.

Now to the real disturbing findings. On the outside of the stringers where they connect to the transom there were holes cut through the inner skin. So any moisture that came to the stern on the outside of the stringers went right in the transom wood.
http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...ps55lfhgqz.jpg

Here you can kind of see the hole. This is the starboard side. What really sucks is this also let the moisture to seep into the stringer. But he doesn't think it made its way far into the stringer. Tomorrow he's going to cut a section out of the inner skin and investigate more. And he said it will also give him better access to tie the stringers into the new transom well.

Here's about 1/2 of the nastiness pulled out.
http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2jwsjgrj.jpg

We got all the big stuff out. Tomorrow he's gonna let the rest of the wood residue dry out and hit it with the sander to clean up the skin. Then start putting it all back together. He's going to lay another layer of glass to the inner skin making sure it's sealed up from everything else. He also plans on making some passages from outside of the stringers into the bilge for any water to drain into the bilge instead of the transom.

Also in the 3rd pic you can see the 2 scupper tubes coming out and close to right in the middle you can see about a 1" diameter hole that was cut into the inner skin. This also would let any moisture into the transom. As well as the holes from the 20" motor weren't sealed up on the inside. Plenty of ways for moisture to enter the transom. But the glass guy guarantees it won't be that way again.

Wellcraft could have saved us all a lot of grief with a little more work. If they would have sealed the holes in the stringers with a little resin and glassed the top of the transom instead of the aluminum strips. But I guess they weren't built to go 30 something years.

Grinded the wood off the outer skin tonight. Gonna get the inner skin cleaned up tomorrow. It still had some wet spots and I figured that'd gum up the wheel pretty quickly. Should be dry by tomorrow evening. Then we will start glassing it all back together this weekend. My glass guy was working was another transom tonight glassing it all together and it's definitely more complicated then I thought it'd be. Glad I'm not going at this on my own that's for sure.

Got the inner skin cleaned up. I can't believe all the ways for water to get into the transom.
http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...psifqmjjbp.jpg

Was talking a bit to the glass guy and he noticed there were stress cracks in the gel coat on the corners of the transom. He believes the problem is that the 2 lower motor bolts are 4" higher than where the stringers connect to the transom. This is the bad thing about raising a 20" transom I guess.

He believes putting a couple knees in it will make it more than strong enough. We came up with a plan to run 2 knees from the transom down to tie into the stringers and the last bulkhead. I'll have to put a bit smaller hatch door to access the bilge but I can still have a 14"x24" opening so I think that's plenty. It mainly looked like the opening there was so long before because there was a battery shelf in there. We cut that out as well as the batteries are in the console now.

He dug into the stringers also and other than the last inch or so they are solid as a rock so that's good news.