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Those doors look great - I like the lines...  There's a good design in the Manual that this organization puts together as well.  Any chance you've got measurements or a schematic for a pretty thing like that?  

THis year, we're going to do basic dropboards because we've got so much going on, but I'd love to do companionway doors for next year, I think.

Cool - where are you?  Send me a private message, if you can.  I just happen to be at my parents' home this week taking care of a few things....

Does anyone have a picture of what the originals look like?  Exact dimensions, whether they were tongue-in-groove, etc.?  

Any suggestions or insight are very welcome.

We had read something about this and are considering it instead of anti-fouling paint.  Is this a bad idea?  Has anyone used it?

Not that we're going to bee painting this month, but we still hope to get the boat in the water this season.

sorry for the long post, but I am panicking...

Spring came to NYC and we started in on the Augusta (our Commander) last week.  We picked up with the massive portside hole and have started laying glass.  The previous hole, which was a 4-inch puncture with 2 feet of delaminated glass, was filled with bondo and then painted over.  Jude's (the other owner of the boat) patch is halfway done and looks perfect - now we build up the outside.

While he was doing that, I started peeling the paint off the keel.  We want to strip all of the paint and prime the whole boat in one go.

When peeling, I decided to drill some drainage holes and get the rest of the water out of the hull.  Then I notice, finally, what looks like a bondo repair -  look at the bottom of the keel – the slightly lighter red area is the repair.  

Yes, that slightly red area does go the entire length of the keel.

I first drilled some drainage holes on Sunday and watched my boat leak like a sieve for 20 minutes.  I get worse water pressure from my shower at home.   I went through bondo first before fiberglass pretty much everywhere I drilled.

I left it alone and came back today to grind out the offending bondo.  It looks like the previous owner all but tore the keel off the boat.  And then, he did a crappy repair of the whole thing.  I don't know who fixed this, but it's crap.  Most of the bondo I removed was soaked like mud – this must be a sponge in the water.  There is one layer of fiberglass mat in most places, some matting in others and a nearly 1/2 inch thick layer of bondo - note the pile of pink powder below the boat – then it was primed and painted.  I didn't even touch the fiberglass and I'm sure I'm not done with the hull.

This seems like a huge problem to me – I'm sure it is.  But how huge?  We don't want to scrap the boat (the idea was discussed), but don't know how to proceed.  How can we make this boat safe?  Jude wants to build the existing hull up with matting and roving – the same way the hull was built, but a lot thicker.  We have no idea how to get under the boat – the bondo is a candy shell over the whole keel and there are at least 4 holes with major delamination over the center and back of the keel.  

I'm going to lose sleep over this, I know it.  I wanted to camp at the yard just to bee there when the keel gives way and powders our boat.

The keel has no strength or integrity & I'm not sure how it's supporting the boat.  Any suggestions or advice?  Has anyone rebuilt a keel before?

Any compound that you can suggest?  These are right at the waterline, but only in the gelcoat.

It looks like Commander 303 has boat pox on the port side of the bow to about halfway back.  This seems to only go thru the gel coat and not the glass underneath.  

So how bad is boat pox, exactly and is this indicative of bigger problems?

Is there anything wrong with doing this in two steps?  Our concern is keeping the shape of the hull.  We've got stands on either side of this damaged area as well as 4 other supports evenly placed around the hull.  The bulkhead is out and can't be replaced until we fix the damaged area on the inside.  Some of the delaimination is behind the bulkhead.  

If the hull loses its shape, we are in truly bad shape.  I don't know if we can fix it then.  Right now, the glass is so thin that light comes through it - bright light.  We want to lay up the interior and then work from the outside.  It seems like the only way to do it.  

And yeah, ebb, that's about 4 feet of delaminated glass that we've removed and the place where the jack stand had been is delaminated all the way through.  It looks like the hull was punctured not once, but 3 times.  It must have been a rock, but what an impact!

I spent another 4 hours tonight sanding down fiberglass and removing any delaminated glass and it doesn't seem to be looking any better.  The berth is out, the bulkhead has been removed and the problem we thought was big is a little bigger.

We're not pros here.  We're just trying to figure this one out.

After all of the sanding, it looks like the stand the boat was on has caused a lot more damage than we thought - it's delaminated all the way through and has actually made a  nice square imprint on the damaged area.  It looks like we'll be at this for a while yet.

How cold can you work with fiberglass?  We want to get this done this season, but the fix keeps getting bigger.  Any tips & encouragement are welcome.  

At least Jude has cut a new bulkhead and it looks pretty excellent.  
Jude's got a real talent for wood.

I couldn't believe how easy this was.  i thought it was going to be a nightmare because every book I have ever read about it says you should sand down the tabs to remove interior pieces.  Some suggested a Sawzall, but it seemed like it would do a lot more damage than anything and we still wanted the old bulkhead as a template for the new one that we wanted to put in.

We used my brother's Dremel.  It let me get into tight spaces, to cut the tabs and only the tabs, and to remove the whole bulkhead and berth intact.  It took about 2 hours at a pretty easy pace.  Next, we'll use a cold chisel to get rid of the extra tabbing and sand it fair.  In fact, we used a cold chisel to knock out some of the trickier angles.  Almost no dust.

Man, it felt good to rip out that bulkhead.  Now we've got a clear working area around our puncture, can replace the dry-rotted bulkhead and replace the old plastic laminate with something more to our liking.  

Love that Dremel.

Like so many others, our boom came off in my partners hand one day in the yard (has this happened to anyone at sea?) and we aren't replacing the whole thing just yet.

We're trying a cheapo fix to the boom eyelet problem - a friend that's a metals guy bored out the back of the original piece and cut a counter sink made out of hardened steel into it.  The original bolt should fit that.  It's quick and cheap and gets our boom back on, but we'll have to wait until next season to see how well it works.  If it doesn't, our friend says he'll bore one out of stainless steel for us.  

At least it's solved for now.

Hmmm....  Vacuum-bagging - I need to look into that.  Our thought was to tear away all of the imperfect glass and rebuild it.  The less glass to sand, the happier I am.  Last time, me & my partner wound up looking like frosted flakes more than captain crunchies and itched like mental patients (thank you, Commander Pete for that turn o' phrase) for a few days.  I itched in places I didn't know I had places to itch.  

As for the damage, I think this is was a full-speed run aground right in our harbor.  He would have had to haul it out quick and there wasn't really any internal water damage.  The harbor around the east side of City Island is full of big rocks and the high- and low-tide can vary as much as 8-10 feet.  I think our previous owner (I have a lot of names for him, but we'll call him) Fred, wasn't much of a sailor.  Even if he was a good sailor, coming in at night, those rocks aren't illuminated.  I think one of those stopped our boat when it was going 5 knots or more.  

Which I also think is a seperate incident from a straight-on whack to a bulkhead - it's the right height and the bow pulpit was mangled.  But at least that's an easier repair...

Either way, it's all guesswork.  I'm sure my partner's got another theory.

wow - thanks so much.  I think that'll be a great help.

I was at the boat today - here are the result of the last sanding session.  The overall damaged area - still trying to find where the delaminated glass ends.  We're going to remove that bulkhead this week and we're going to consider ebb's advice as we go forward.  Thanks, ebb.

The second shot give a good sense of the thru-hull hole.  That's where the bondo is.  

The third shot is just a sample of the all-too-familiar delaminated glass.  

More to come as we go.  

On a positive note, the brightwork is looking fantastic and we casted a new eyehole for the boom that will replace the connection that broke on us recently.  More on that later - my partner had a very good idea.

We're approaching the repair pretty much by the book, at least the book I've read.  As the bulkhead is dry rotted, we'll have to pull that out on the Port side.  The damaged section goes underneath & behind the bulkhead.  Hopefully, that won't be much more than cutting the tabbing and then sanding it down behind it.

As for the damage, we've beeen sanding away until we hit true glass (not delaminated) and then angling it out at about 30 degrees.  So far, we haven't even peeled away everything from the inside yet and we have a 5 foot by 1 foot area sanded away, going through 3 layers of roving and matting so far.  That took about 4 hours with 40 grit sandpaper on a random orbital sander hooked up to a vacuum system.  Itchy stuff all the same.

That's when the problem started looking really huge.  The delaminatiion just didn't seem to have an end.  So we sanded down the exterior hull and assessed it.

The next step is to sound out the bondo, find where the actual hole is and knock out the patch material.  Then we sand thru on both sides (interior & exterior), until we find true glasss all around the repair.  One there, we'll drill holes, mount sheet metal on the outside of the hull and start building up the repair from the inside the same way it was built:  fiberglass, roving, matting, fiberglass, etc.  

Once that's been done, we reinstall the bulkhead (marine ply) and start making it look pretty.
Any input on this would be greatly appreciated.  It's a big job.

This is what we're looking at on Augusta, Commander #303.  You can see the damaged area at the waterline on the right of the picture.  This one has about everythign worng with it that you might not want:  the hull was punched through below the waterline, there was a bad repair and extensive delamination behind the bulkhead and on the interior of the hull and then they put a truly bad Rustoleum paint job on top of it.  

We have stripped the hull of the old paint & gotten an idea of the size of the hole - next step is to tackle that problem.  I'll make sure to include shots of the interior - that's where things get really interesting.