Some of you been following and reading my post on the 74 Mercury 650 I'm working on. The boat that came off of is a 73 Glassmaster TriHull. Anyway I've been reading through various forums and post. I'm finding some old info and new info on the topic of stringer replacement. What I'm dealing with was/is a false sense of hope that there wasn't nothing wrong with the stringers do to the fact that the fiberglass encasing them is strong enough to hold my weight without collapsing. I got to doing some poking around what I'm finding is the wood is rotted where they screwed the deck to the stringers. But beyond that the wood seems fine.
My research is telling me I've got my choice of:
using seacast
using some sort of epoxy resin to reharden the wood
or I could rip the stringers totally out and redo them and the fiberglass holding them in from ground up.
None of this I have a whole lot of experience in. Now I did have a nice conversation with the gal that owns the seacast company. She's recommending that if I use seacast I'd have to use it as a total replacement product for the stringers and the deck and not to introduce wood at all. Problem I got is after crunching some numbers its going to be a hell of an expense job to do and apply to a boat that's 40 years old.
I don't know enough about the epoxy option to actually consider that as an option.
Ripping out the stringers totally and replacing them is an option. However, I would have to take some extra steps to prep my shop for that task.
So I know this is a topic that's been beaten around the bush many times. But I thought I'd throw it out there to see what other people have experienced, tried and used that I may not be considering.
My research is telling me I've got my choice of:
using seacast
using some sort of epoxy resin to reharden the wood
or I could rip the stringers totally out and redo them and the fiberglass holding them in from ground up.
None of this I have a whole lot of experience in. Now I did have a nice conversation with the gal that owns the seacast company. She's recommending that if I use seacast I'd have to use it as a total replacement product for the stringers and the deck and not to introduce wood at all. Problem I got is after crunching some numbers its going to be a hell of an expense job to do and apply to a boat that's 40 years old.
I don't know enough about the epoxy option to actually consider that as an option.
Ripping out the stringers totally and replacing them is an option. However, I would have to take some extra steps to prep my shop for that task.
So I know this is a topic that's been beaten around the bush many times. But I thought I'd throw it out there to see what other people have experienced, tried and used that I may not be considering.