With all the fun skiing talk out of the way... Time to share my most recent update! Super excited to have finally started glassing the stringers! I spent ~1hr of prep (cleaning the boat, cutting glass, measuring where I wanted to do my joints, etc.), and then put the mask on and spent about 5 hours glassing. By the time I was done it was past 11pm lol whoops. But overall I am SUPER happy and proud of how everything turned out, I vowed to have a zero bubble, zero dry fiber glassing in the boat so I definitely spent an extra bit of time than maybe was necessary. But I think it was well worth the extra effort.
note: there is some dry glass in the bottom right of the 2nd photo, this is where I stopped glassing near the rear of the boat since I hadnt made up my mind on how I wanted to do the drainage.
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I decided to do the CSM with the Tab, Tab, Cap method. doing 5" legs on the side, and a 7" cap overt top. This took a majority of the time since my stringers are ~14ft and with 4ft lengths of tabbing, it took 12 different pieces to do the whole thing. And with the Poly setting up after 15-20min I was only able to do 1-2 pieces at a time.
The Mat went faster, I cut one big piece and set it over the top of the stringer, then used the poly and CSM layer which was still tacky to get it to mostly form into place. I then rolled out a MINIMAL amount of Poly over the top just enough to let it go clear (like
Woodonglass recommended multiple times). It worked out great, but a bit of Poly still pooled around the corners where my fillets were. I'm not too worried about that though.
So now, I am 1/4 of the way done to being ready for the floor lol, not to mention all of my wiring and hoses I want to make conduit/raceways for. Seems like it took a really long time, but I was being really meticulous so I'm not totally surprised.
One thing that I have a question on. In the back, there are drain plugs going out the back of the boat. In addition to the one that is in the center under the motor. It seems like these are for any sort of gas leak/overflow to be able to drain, because they are on the outside of the stringers. I was planning on not putting in the holes, and having the stringers mate to the hull, then sealing off that section from the foam with bulkheads, but wanted to see what you all thought.
Before, there were holes through the rear part of the stringer to connect the center area with the outside areas. This is also where all the rot began because it doesnt seem like they did much thought with this. It also allowed water to get to the foam which was a bad idea.
In the image below I have the back of my boat. My profile cut of my stringers was not great :blue: as you can see by the gap (there was a bump up that I measured off the old stringer, but apparently was not as exaggerated as I thought. I plan to fill that in with PB and then glass over top. In the back corner I cut the stringer to match the "hole" that was in the old ones, but the more I think, I want to just fill those in with PB and glass over as well. Then I would isolate the little hole right next to the stringer (the drain plug) within a bulk head that I would put just in front of my little profile mistake.
heck we would ski behind a glastron tri hull with i think a 50 rude lol barfoot was painful and took a faster boat but i only did it a couple times and wasn't enjoyable to me.
