My brother has a 1983 17' Dargel Skout, which is a flat bottom tunnel hull with a semi V on the front. He bought the boat used a about a year ago and it was allready pretty beat up on the bottom from being used in the shallows, but recently started taking on water. You could tell where the problem was easily, there was an old damage repair that was flaking off around the edges and not sanded underneath, who knows what's under the patch, and two cracks about 2 feet long, one on each side as the flat bottom turned up towards the front. We knew what needed to be done, i've been hooked on reading iboats threads for weeks before this, lol. But was the hull worth fooling with? We allready had a small boat restoration going on in the garage, and it has turned out to be quite a bit more work than we'd like to be doing during the 100 degree days this summer. So we decided to let the Pro's have a look at it! I took it to a local shop who hand builds bay boats, and happens to be the place we bought this boat from, and they quickly said "don't worry, we do this all the time, it's worth fixing.". You know, I live in south Texas, labor isn't super high, it sounds right. Plus they had several other boats there with the floors out of them, i've seen them working on plugs for new hulls and hand laying new hulls with my own eyes. BUT when it comes to repair work, they just didn't step up to the plate. Maybe it was the heat, but I am very dissapointed with the results. 
These are places we wanted fixed but they said looked fine to them...after they had it for 6 weeks. See the water leaking out of one crack...
This is the place they did fix, yeah, that's bondo under there...
They said they flooded the boat hull to check for leaks, so we picked it up Friday evening and put it in the water Saturday morning...hull was filled about half way with water when we pulled it out a few hours later. We also asked them to adjust our bunks, of course for a fee, but they needed to go up...well the brackets wouldn't allow the boards to go up, so obviously it needed new brackets...it's a pro shop remember folks...but instead the moved them outboard? Now the U-bolts are not threaded far enough because the outboard frame is skinnier than where it used to be mounted, so what would a Pro shop do? Use scrap pieces of 2x4 of course!
These guys know my brother well enough to know that price was not an object here, we were expecting a much higher quote than what they gave us. In my mind a large section of the floor would have needed to come out, and the hull repaired from the inside..All damage is contained to an area of about 4' square, and it just needs to be ground out, glassed, and redecked. The hole they cut in the floor was about the size of a shoebox, and I have my doubts that they even went all the way to the floor through the top before closing it back up and deciding to patch one small spot from the bottom.
If ya want something done right, ya gotta do it yourself.
These are places we wanted fixed but they said looked fine to them...after they had it for 6 weeks. See the water leaking out of one crack...
This is the place they did fix, yeah, that's bondo under there...
They said they flooded the boat hull to check for leaks, so we picked it up Friday evening and put it in the water Saturday morning...hull was filled about half way with water when we pulled it out a few hours later. We also asked them to adjust our bunks, of course for a fee, but they needed to go up...well the brackets wouldn't allow the boards to go up, so obviously it needed new brackets...it's a pro shop remember folks...but instead the moved them outboard? Now the U-bolts are not threaded far enough because the outboard frame is skinnier than where it used to be mounted, so what would a Pro shop do? Use scrap pieces of 2x4 of course!
These guys know my brother well enough to know that price was not an object here, we were expecting a much higher quote than what they gave us. In my mind a large section of the floor would have needed to come out, and the hull repaired from the inside..All damage is contained to an area of about 4' square, and it just needs to be ground out, glassed, and redecked. The hole they cut in the floor was about the size of a shoebox, and I have my doubts that they even went all the way to the floor through the top before closing it back up and deciding to patch one small spot from the bottom.
If ya want something done right, ya gotta do it yourself.
