sighmoon
Well-Known Member
After escaping from her mooring, and spending 24 hours bouncing on the rocks, my boat was repaired by a local yard.
She's fibreglass, over a foam core, with a layer of epoxy on the outside. She was badly scuffed, but not holed.
After 6 weeks back in she was taken out of the water for the winter. There are some holes in the repaired area, and it seems a bit soft. The holes are a few milimeters deep, and a few mil wide.
A helpful, passing surveyor had a look and put his moisture meter up to the hull - it went off the scale in the repaired area, but was at zero on the original hull surface.
So I called the yard that did the work. He said the boat was repaired with epoxy, but there is a layer of filler which can easily be shaped and sanded over that, (as sanding epoxy takes days) and it is the filler that I'm referring to. I'm questioning the wisdom of that approach - as the saying goes 'nothing sticks to epoxy except epoxy'. Surely a non epoxy filler, over an epoxy surface can be expected to fall out every time. It also seems daft to use something absorbant in an underwater application. Or am I missing something here?
Even if an easily sanded layer is the 'done thing', I would have thought a layer of epoxy ofver the outside of it would have been a good idea.
The yard also said the moisture is probably coming from inside the repair. This seems unlikely to me, as if they really did repair it with epoxy, any moisture inside would be trapped inside, as it wouldn't be able to cross the epoxy, surely?
I was paying for the repair out of my own pocket as th insurance was only third party, so he was trying to keep the cost down. Eventually I paid for three days work to reshape the skeg and rudder, and to repair the hull. The repair looked generally loveless at the time (but we're keeping your costs down) as they used a rather different colour to paint the topsides, and I could see fibreglass cloth on the skeg (so he put some isopon P40 on it just before launch.)
Does what the yard are saying sound reasonable?
She's fibreglass, over a foam core, with a layer of epoxy on the outside. She was badly scuffed, but not holed.
After 6 weeks back in she was taken out of the water for the winter. There are some holes in the repaired area, and it seems a bit soft. The holes are a few milimeters deep, and a few mil wide.
A helpful, passing surveyor had a look and put his moisture meter up to the hull - it went off the scale in the repaired area, but was at zero on the original hull surface.
So I called the yard that did the work. He said the boat was repaired with epoxy, but there is a layer of filler which can easily be shaped and sanded over that, (as sanding epoxy takes days) and it is the filler that I'm referring to. I'm questioning the wisdom of that approach - as the saying goes 'nothing sticks to epoxy except epoxy'. Surely a non epoxy filler, over an epoxy surface can be expected to fall out every time. It also seems daft to use something absorbant in an underwater application. Or am I missing something here?
Even if an easily sanded layer is the 'done thing', I would have thought a layer of epoxy ofver the outside of it would have been a good idea.
The yard also said the moisture is probably coming from inside the repair. This seems unlikely to me, as if they really did repair it with epoxy, any moisture inside would be trapped inside, as it wouldn't be able to cross the epoxy, surely?
I was paying for the repair out of my own pocket as th insurance was only third party, so he was trying to keep the cost down. Eventually I paid for three days work to reshape the skeg and rudder, and to repair the hull. The repair looked generally loveless at the time (but we're keeping your costs down) as they used a rather different colour to paint the topsides, and I could see fibreglass cloth on the skeg (so he put some isopon P40 on it just before launch.)
Does what the yard are saying sound reasonable?
