Batboat Rebuild: Day 40 August 5th, 2009

So much time has passed since I've worked on the Batboat and blogged I needed to read through my blog to figure out what had been accomplished!

Here it goes.

I had a break that lasted a full week while the tooling polyester resin was being shipped from US Composits. These two gallons make a total of 13th gallons ordered. Where did it all go? lol!

At $45+ per gallon, including UPS, it is not cheap!

I also bought two more 28 oz. cartridges of PL Construction Adhesive. Five so far. This caulk will be used up to bond the deck along the top of the stringers.

These are the stainless steel screws I'll used to secure the deck to the stringers when it is laid on on the caulk.

100 screws may seem a lot but I ended up using most. They are #8 1 1/4 inch screws. Different sized screws will be used to lay the deck plywood to the cross braces.

Stainless screws are essential because they don't rust. Glastron used metal staples and by the time I owned the boat nearly all had corroded.


I can't remember exactly what I did on this day but the photos tell me the new roll of 1708 biaxial fiberglass cloth came in. I must have finished up the repairs and fiberglassing in the stringers to the hull.


By now I was working in the Batboat wearing shorts and uneven spots of fiberglass poked into my skin. I bought the knee pads weeks earlier and they came in handy.


The new 1708 and my cutting table.



The repaired and cleaned up sections in the stringers where the cross braces would go were covered over with one last layer of 1.5 chopped stran mat and 1708 was rolled up the sides. The excess got ground down later.



Yet another layer of 1708 biaxial cloth bonds the stringers to the transom. Again, the excess gets ground down later.

1708 is among the strongest fiberglass weaves available. It is 17 ounces of woven material stitched on top of 8 ounces of chopped strand mat, equaling 25 oz. of fiberglass!!

This rebuild is many times more stronger than what the factory built.

A small hole was left in bottom of the stringers where they meet the transom. This lets water drain to the bilge area if it ever got under the deck. Sorry, they are hard to see. More on this later, however.