Our friend Howie Picard wrote a few articles for AMF Alcort back in the 1980s about overweight Sunfish and how to replace the foam blocks. Here are the two articles.
Howie worked at Alcort from 1960-1978 then did warranty work for them for many years. We caught up with him around 2011 and have had a fun time discussing various repairs. One way to bring the weight down on a Sunfish is to force warm dry air through them, the water will come out over a period of weeks at the earliest but more likely a few months. Howie was one of the few people qualified to split the deck open, remove the wet expanding foam and replace the white extruded polystyrene structural blocks. STOP RIGHT NOW!. DO NOT THROW AWAY THE WHITE BLOCKS, unless you have a cheap source for a replacement, they are hard to find. Better to let them dry out for a few weeks.
So Howie tutored us through several replacements, and even sent us the 60 clamps that he used to use. You can learn more about foam repair by searching for foam on our blog or looking at our post on Sunfish Foam Repair. It is not for the faint of heart but it works and a boat can be brought back to fighting weight in days vs months. Usually there are other issues to attend to inside the hull anyway, like backer blocks, so it makes sense sometimes to pop the seam vs installing an inspection port.
Sunfish Foam Repair
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