Ok...today was 10 hours of removing foam (yep 2 guys)...what a pain that was. We used a garden shovel (short and flat) and the trick was to only put it in a few inches and lift...larger chunks break this way. If you go to deep you cannot get it to break well. We then used short crow bars to bust up deeper and scrape the glass clean. We still have to run some wire brushes over to clean everything off were we'll retab.
Sadly the good foam will not come out easily but the wet stuff will seperate from the hull/glass easily. For us 70% of the foam was good and could have stayed but the right think todo was to take it out to see what was under it. Nothing was smelly or rottted...just a little wet in a few corners.
Who can tell us what is the best way to prep the old glass when tabbing over. I've seen grind, dewax and clean. Can someone talk more on the deway/cleaning solutions used?
The only think I can say at this point as I feel I know enough about building skill to really give this build a C-/+ below the deck. Like Liam said it's prob not as much about bad years but bad days. We found many holes in the stringer/bulkheads not sealed and rotted, poorly terminated glass that allowed wood to have direct access to water, poor and redundant bulkhead locations...just sloppy work everywhere. I sure hope they don't build boats like this anymore!
If you look at the photo 4992 where Evan is stilling I've drew a red line below an area that they put extra glass in the back area...not sure why but it seems to be a reinforcement on both sides. The problem it's pulled up...not really delaminated, just poorly done. From what we can tell it may very well be a water channel to the stringers.
Question: Can we just grind this down and glass over and be done? Or should it be cut out as much as posible...anyone seen this before?
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