Fixing the Boat 2

The Zizumara is getting ready for the epic snowmelt that is gonna be racing down our mountains.  Most of the patching has been done, the oar locks are bolted into place and the gunwales are looking good. Here is  a little recap of the repair project.

This is a view of the bottom of the boat.  Note the hairline smiley face crack.  You might think, no big deal. Not a bad hit at all...

Argh! A little uglier view from the inside.  This is round one of picking out the shattered plywood.

Round 2 of picking out the useless wood.  Note all the grey Grand Canyon grit coating the wood.

Final round of shattered wood removal.  The orange glow is the light from the heater showing through the exterior glass.  It took weeks to dry out this zone. It was completely saturated and spongy.  A large portion of the thwart had to be removed as well. The wood was just turned into tiny bits and pieces between flawless glass.

Patch complete with new glass, fillets and glass tape.  You can see here how much of the thwart was replaced.  The rock hit which caused this damage was directly under the thwart.

The purple fairing goes down and is sanded to 320 same as the rest of the boat.

The anti-skid texture was epoxied to the bottom.

The zone where the new texture and old texture meet is gonna look a little obvious as some of the epoxy coated the old textured area and will make it look too smooth.  Ahh...close enough.  This zone is gonna get bashed again.

Primed and ready for the color coat.

Not perfect but done.  I think the bottom will look better once it gets a little worn like the rest.

One issue I had to fix on the Ziz was gunwale bolts.  They were pulling through the wood.  On this photo you can see a dark shadow just below the bolt head.

The other issue on the gunwale was water damage where the varnish rubbed off.

Here is an image of the indented wood with the bolt removed.

Here is the fix. I filled the indentation with wood flour and fiberglass fillet then when it was nearly set I created a square notch for the carriage bolt to fit.

With the gunwales varnished and all the bolt issues cared for it took only an hour to fasten the bolts and the oar lock.

The Ziz is ready for the water now!

The one place on the boat that had a problem which wasn't due to user error... kind of, was the front cross hatch area.  During the summer the wood expanded and popped the glass.  Somehow water must have been getting in and after tearing off the old glass I think I found the problem zone.  This area looked water damaged.

I cleaned it up, dried it out and put in some epoxy filler then glassed over the whole area again.  Laid down a layer of fairing compound and got to painting.

Primed.

Color coat.

Another fun project was working on a repair of a friends oar.  Its a beautiful 10 foot solid ash smoker oar.  The blade was nearly snapped in half when a gust of wind took it and our kitchen tarp airborne.  Luckily, most of the crew was in the kitchen because we had been blown out of our own tents.  We captured things just in time.  I straightened out the blade by wetting one side and placing weight on the other.  It took a few weeks but it worked!

All varnished up and ready to feel the Canyon again.