Quest Nº 5 Cut out the old bilge

So the engine was out, the keel was down the damaged stringers were cut out and the bottom was cleared of de-laminated fiberglass and cleaned. We were almost ready for, to use the words of the famous youtuber Mess, oh glorious sanding.

We had just one more piece of creative destruction to conclude and thus it was time for Quest Nº 5 Cut out the old bilge

We first took care of some preparations for the rebuilding process though. That included making a thin one layer fiberglass sheet that would later become the base for the new bilge box. As much as the making of the sheet was more a morale booster, letting us focus a bit on creation rather then destruction... The second task was an absolute necessity we needed to build a guide of sorts to help us put the new bilge in the right place.

Let me explain so our bilge is a bit wired, it is a tiny box that extends outside of the boat and fit's into a cut out in the keel. We needed to make sure that we new exactly where to place the new one so it would fit in with the keel and after the old one was cut we would loose any kind of reference.

To make things a little bit more tricky one of the keel bolts that secure our keel to Oiysh goes through the bilge so we needed to have some kind of a guide that would tell us where to put the hole for it in the new bilge. If we would make a mistake and the new hole would be misaligned even by a couple of mm that would mean the keel could not be reattached, and we would have to go through the whole process again potentially setting us back by weeks of work and hundreds of dollars. No pressure :P

The idea was to make a kind of mold, that would cover the outline of the box as well as part of the bottom, we would then drill it to mark exactly where the holes for the keel bolts were. That would later help us align the new box before fiberglassing it to Oiysh. This mold was supposed to be a one time use item so we went with polyester instead of epoxy, it was a way cheaper solution.

Some ants passed as we put on the layers. It's always tricky to fiberglass when the gravity is working against you but with 4 hands and a solid prewet we somehow managed.

After the mold was cured all that needed to be done was drilling the holes and cleaning up their edges.

The mold covered 5 holes in total to give as much reference as possible. Still after analyzing it we weren't convinced if that would be enough to guide the new bilge box in place, so Bartek made a backup jig which you'll get to see a bit later in the project. And it's a good thing that he did as we ended up using it instead of the fiberglass mold which turned out to be way to flimsy. Some wasted material but knowledge gained.

It was finally time for the main event cutting out the old bilge box. It took some time to cut through all the thick walls but it wasn't anything the handy multi tool couldn't handle. In fact after this project it joined our must have tools list. Three out of four sides were cut so the job from outside was done for now and as the rain was stopping only for minutes at a time we moved to work inside.

Yet again the chisle came in handy when Bartek started detaching the part of the bilge that was above the cut and still stuck to the hull. It didn't take long and after prying here and there the bilge detached itself and was barely hanging on the fiberglass mold we did earlier.

The deed was done we had a new hole in the boat.

Upon closer inspection of the old bilge box we found ourselves very happy that we decided to remove it all together and replace with a new one. It was fixed a couple of times already had many smaller and bigger cracks and generally didn't look too healthy.

A bit more clean up of the edges revealed that we had yet some more de-lamination to deal with but in the grand sachem of things it was a tiny insignificant detail. We concluded that it wasn't going that far and a simple injection of thickened epoxy should do the trick. At least this was our version and we were sticking to it.

The outside also got a good grind and all the remaining pieces of the stern tube were removed.

We were ready to start rebuilding well almost the most dreaded inside grinding was still ahead of us