Transom repair - Here we go..... (long)

[mauryc]

I just took measurements with a tape measure and drew it out on engineering paper. The key is the thickness. I did my calcs using 1 3/4 inch wood thickness and the dimensions were out to the sides of the hull. I came up with almost 4000 cubic inches or almost 17 gallons. I took about a gallon off of that for outter hull thickness. I knew it would be close. The void was closer to 1 1/2 inches thick and the void didn't extend up as far on the sides as I thought. I ended up using about 14 gallons total. I had received a free gallon of the stuff as a sample a while back so I had about 16 gallons on hand. When I did the sides, I mixed up a gallon at a time.

Spareparts, I don't own a little boat - that was tsubaki's contribution to the post.

Its not 100% complete, but here are some of my thoughts. I DID NOT want to pull the cap or cut it in any way. I don't go offshore much anymore - this boat will spend most of its life in the lakes and bayous down here pulling tubes and keeping beer cold. I feel this transom will certainly hold up to that. I live in a subdivision so I can't (nor did I want to) have boat parts spread all over my yard for weeks on end. I wasn't able to hang a hoist from anything to pull the cap off so I chose this method. I was able to contain the mess to my boat port. Finally, the cost was probably a little more than wood and glass, but not much. Quality resin is expensive. And obviously, taking it to someone would have been $2k easy. My transom in my old 75' V was $1500 about 15 years ago. I didn't have that $$ to invest in a boat I paid about $4k for.

Removing the wood is by far the hardest part (except for removing a 175 Johnson without a hoist!) So far, I have about 10-12 solid hours in the project (removing the wood was most of that time). The pour took longer than I thought - about 3 hours. That's mostly because of the upper parts of the transom and I had to let the lower part solidify so the stuff wouldn't ooze out when I poured. All in all, that's not bad.

Final pics and comments soon.

Maury