Batboat Rebuild: Day 9 September 17, 2008

The weather had been great so far so the next afternoon I hauled the large 8 x 10 foot sheet of marine grade plywood and table saw out of the back room to the back yard. The main objective was to cut the two longest stringers.

Stringers are very important structural components to a boat like mine. They are fiberglassed along the length of the bottom of the hull to help the fiberglass boat hold its shape. Mine has four of them. Two are about 12 foot long and two about 5 foot.

I made patterns from the original stringers a few days before, using the same kind of brown packaging paper I used on the transom. Rolls of this were found during a chance visit to the dollar store and they came in handy. The longest stringers are 12 foot.and the paper is, I think around 15 feet.

I traced the rotten wood on the sidewalk in front of my house, cut out the pattern, traced that to the plywood, and cut with a jig saw.


The two longer stringers was so rotted in their fiberglass wraps that I had no trouble pulling them out of the Batboat by hand and they came out mostly intact. The other two smaller stringers had to be cut out of their fiberglass with my grinder the day after this.


The above shows the original stringer lying on top of the new one. They are almost a perfect match.

My new jig saw. I got it at Lowe's clearance priced and like it better than some of the higher priced models they had.

The stringers are cut from a 3/4 inch, 4 x 8 foot sheet of Marine Grade Douglas Fur plywood, one of the best and expensive plywoods available.

At the end of the day I didn't have time to cut the traced out shorter portions for the long set of stringers so I set out to do that later.


The make and model ID tag for my boat was riveted into the splash well. I carefully drilled the rivets out and hope somehow to remove the blue paint without damaging the metal.

This is very thin and malleable.

The extremely fragile plate's model and serial numbers identifies my boat as being a 1969 Glastron V-145, color blue. More on that later.