Shields Prep Week Update 2

Got another big day in yesterday. Dave and I spent about 6hrs sanding and prepping the boat. Here are a couple photos from the last 3 days.

Niki sanded off the rest of the deck's non skid, and I just think this is a neat photo.


This is the inside of the hull deck joint, located in the (dust cave) front air tank. The tabbing on the left has come loose, and you can see the crack on the right.



Removing the tabbing was generally no fun, but it was made a lot easier by our new Fein Multimaster tool. This tool gives you a very thin saw blade and thin sanders, which made it (relatively) easy to separate the tabbing from the hull. This took about 4 hrs, and would have taken much longer if I had to grind it all off, which would also have been quite clumsy working upside down in the bow.



Once we retabbed and reglued the deck joint, we clamped it using white duct tape. In this photo you can also see the paint removal progress, and the bow repair.


The paint removal went pretty well, especially with Dave and I both sanding it off. There was quite a few layers of paint on there. The photo above shows the topography of the hull: we had two very very thick layers of green paint, a gray primer coat, a layer of blue paint, then the blue gelcoat. We took the boat all the way down to gelcoat to make a good base for the awlgrip primer.


Since were sanding off the boot stripe, we'd need a way to replace it. There is a scribed set of lines on the hull, but I was worried that we'd end up filling that in with primer and filler. Instead I transferred the waterlines down to the bottom paint with a permanent marker and a batten. We may raise the waterline a bit, which will be easy to do using a slightly longer batten for transferring it back.

The bow damage was pretty extensive, and I had to grind a lot of material out to get to undamaged glass. For about 4 hrs, we nearly had a plumb bow! We then made a cardboard mold from inside the boat, which acted as base for laying up new glass.

Dave and I then had the pretty fun job of laying in new glass. We used 4" 18oz biaxial tape to wrap the bow and build up new structure. I like his "ankle wrapping" analogy. We've got a very strong structure up there, as its 5 layers at the tip and top. It's very nice to have a pointy Shields again! Dave is shown here below our handiwork.

Not shown:
The tabbing job on the inside of the hull/deck joint and bulkhead.
Our blue (for now) boat!

Todays going to be: fairing, sanding, pinhole filling with acryl putty and cleanup. When we left yesterday there was a lot of dust in the air that I want to get vacuumed up before people get there and track it everywhere.

Friday Mar 21:
Dave 6 hrs
Kristian 6 hrs