Lex Strahorn's Home Page

Another tip to those following in my footsteps…..Don’t use a high torque drill when putting those 2 ¾” holes through the high density foam. When the hole saw binds you WILL hurt your wrist. I used one of the Craftsman 19.2 EX drivers and my wrist is very sore. In fact on the fourth or fifth hole a bind resulted in a broken hole saw. It actually twisted the hardened steel shaft in two. Fortunately I am a regular at the local Home depot and they swapped it out no questions asked.

In order to run the ground line and the sensor from the gas tank to the console I had to put a T in the left hand pipe. I found one that had a curve to the T to direct the wires forward and installed it using PVC Cement. The hole fit under the leaning post/live well perfectly.
Next tube was run for inlet and outlets for the live well and the floor again test fit.

I was a little concerned about the flex in the flooring with only one side fiber glassed so I ran a couple supports between the bulkheads that were furthest apart. This gave me enough support that I didn’t feel like I was going to break the foam board.

After wiping everything down with acetone I used four tubes of 5200 sealant to bed the floor to the bulkheads and stringer. I set five gallon pails of resin over the center to keep some weight on it as it dried. Once it dried I attempted to use fiber filled Bondo to make the nicely rounded seam between the floor and the gunnels. Well that didn’t work at all. Instead of making a nice seam the stuff kept dropping down into the hull. That’s when I noticed that I left a screwdriver under the newly set floor….The only way to get it out was to take up that part of the floor. Since it was one of the small, computer type, screwdriver I decided that I would leave it and foam it in with the tubes. A free gift to whoever gets the boat after me:P

Update:
Well I decided to use a very heavy fiberglass “tape” to make the transition from deck to sides. The tape is 8 inches thick with a layer of mat on one side and a biaxial roving on the other. It works very well. I did one side first to make sure. I will do the rest next weekend weather permitting.

Update:
Well used the gallon kit of two part foam that I had bought. The directions say add one to one, mix and pour. Fortunately I spoke to Garret at Fiberglass services before I started. The mix and pour process has to be completed in 30 seconds or so. If I didn’t know that I would have had foam all over the place….At any rate another little thing that they got wrong is how much foam it actually makes. According to the directions it would increase approximately 25 times the liquid volume. Sooo 25 times the volume of a two gallon container, or about 12.5 square feet. Bull. Try a gallon set did not quite fill one third of my boat cockpit floor! That’s about 7-8 square feet. I ordered 2 more one gallon kits.

The next day I got a call from Garret saying that they were out of the one gallon kits but had already run my card. So he said that he would sell me a 5 gallon kit for $211. (Wholesale price)

BTW here is a place to save a lot of money. Boaters world charges $78/half gallon kit, the local surplus was $62/half gallon kit, Fiberglass Services was $42/gallon kit. (And they delivered it!)

Floor in place