We started looking at plans for the daggerboard trunk and daggerboard, and noticed that the plans called for the daggerboard to be made out of 2 layers of 1/4 inch plywood. My brain remembered that we had daggerboards from early Alcort Sunfish that were close in size to the Pram daggerboard, but they are 3/4 inches thick. So I checked with Maynard, one of the design team for the Pram, to see if an ich here or there would matter, and he said it would be fine.
We used the new daggerboard to make sure we made the trunk wide enough front to back, the Sunfish daggerboard is 9 inches vs the design 8 inches, The Sunfish daggerboard is also 31 inches vs 28 a little extra daggerboard will be fine and it still will fit behind the aft seat when not in use.
Ready to do some work on SUGAR 2 but thought we'd check to see if she took on water at the car wash.
Grabbed a couple of carpenter trestles for SUGAR 2, she'll get worked on out at the Carriage House.
The halyard cleat backer block needs replacement, plus it is a good idea to have an inspection port to sponge out water, so we are adding a 6 inch port just ahead of the daggerboard trunk. The port cap makes a nice template to mark the hole size.
We use a jigsaw to cut the hole, and make a starter hole for the jigsaw blade with a 3/8th inch drill bit. If the gelcoat is nice, we tape over the deck with blue tape and draw the circle on the tape, to protect the gelcoat from vibration marks from shoe of the jigsaw. Another tip from one of the team was to tape the shoe.
A look inside at the guts.
The EPS foam structural and flotation blocks are in great condition as well as the expanding foam that holds them in place. There are some light spots on the mast step tube and daggerboard trunk that indicate chipped resin. The halyard cleat backer block is gone and someone siliconed in molly bolts :( But the halyard fairlead backer is still in good shape.
Wrong cleat and wrong fasteners, we cut off the cheapo molly bolts with a DeWALT multi oscillating tool. We will repair the huge holes left from the molly bolts.
SUGAR 2 hasn't even made it all the way off of the trailer and the inspection port hole is already cut and crummy cleat removed. We left her tilted so the little bit of water could drain out.
Interior is drying out, turned our attention to the bow handle. No molly bolts, yay!
We removed the weird handle and probed the holes to see if there was any remnants of the wooden backer block. What we did is poke inside the hole with an awl or paper clip to feel for solid wood. If there was still wood there, then we could have repaired the hole with thickened epoxy and a dowel or toothpicks, let it dry and redrill new holes. Or move the bow handle aft a 1/2 inch or so to drill into new wood. We also drilled a small hole and watched to see if wood shavings came out, no luck, that would have indicated that there was still a block there. S we'll split the bow to put in a new backer block.
Flipped the boat to sand off old fiberglass repairs. We used 40 grit on a DeWALT random orbital sander to take down the big blobs of resin and fiberglass and 120 grit pads to remove the old paint. Our thought was to paint the entire boat but we may be able to salvage the center section and just paint the bow and stern. Also removed the bailer and checked the cockpit/hull bailer seam for splits.
Skipper dug out the old sealant from the daggerboard trunk.
Phoenix needed a little TLC, she had a few leaks and we did an air leak test to figure out where the trouble spots are. We found several, the 2 big culprits being in the bailer hole seam and the daggerboard trunk. The funniest was Mt Vesuvius blowing out the rivet hole in the coaming.
We sealed up those areas with Pettit Flexpoxy, and we also put Marine-Tex epoxy putty over several areas where gelcoat had chipped.
We also sanded the coaming in prep for paint and installed the aluminum cockpit trim that our buddy Alan sent us.
