I'm guessing a few of you might have seen the tommy gnar detonator with the missing royalex. I took off the layers of duct tape and have been drying it out.
Sidenote: nobody in the family has asked me why is there a 10' canoe in the middle of the the living room floor for 3 days
anyway surveying the damage I started to rethink my thoughts of putting GFlex in the WIDE open gap and applying a pressure rig to apply pressure. Its just an open gap and some of the foam core residue is on the inside of the outer ABS/Vinyl and there is of course the meat of the foam core inside. The delamination is in the entire chine area as well as at least 3" to the top and bottom edges. IS GFLEX reasonably good for this since I have it in hand or should I consider other epoxy/adhesives?
After the above is sured up a bit the rest of the plan is:
Phase 1: laying a layer of fiberglass over the basketball sized hole. 1st patch maybe 3" bigger than the hole and the 2nd 6" bigger than the hole to distribute the creeking impact loads. 3" and 6" are just arbitrary sound good?
Phase 2: Take paintable truckbed liner and do atleast 3 layers up through the top of the chine. This will fix the uv issues that are cropping up with the worn off vinyl. It will add a uniform layer of flexible kickasss protection and stiffening of the entire hull.
this more a challenge of keeping the old Detonator alive than giving up on her. $50 and she could be a pool rolling toy for years.
I rescued a delam'd Viper 12 back to Loaner status using GFlex, glass tape and... minicell, but in reverse to your project.
The hull exterior layer of vinyl was intact, not cut thru, so I aggressively cut & peeled off the the delam'd inside hull layer back to good intact royalex to get a good bonding surface.
I then glassed in a repair length spine out of 3/4" then 2" glass tape bedded in GFlex, painting out the Glex onto good hull.
While that was still wet I painted on a 1/8" thick / 24" long, 3"wide strips of Minicell running the length of the inside chine, filling and fairing out the cut out gap. i painted over the minicell with left over Gflex just for abrasion protection
The minicell I cut on the bandsaw till I got what i wanted.
The idea was that the damaged hull had lost it's stiffness and was never going to be standard stiff so the repair had to have some give, especially because it was on the rock eating chine. Therefore the flexible minicell
The repaired Viper 12 Loaner is 12 months back in play, running grade 3, went to the pool for rolling last night, and placed well in a solo category Tamahi 50 Slalom race last month.
Later on I used the same "technique" on another hull but this time I sealed in the layer of minicell with a layer of glass and West epoxy (Glex is $)
On that hull I got a really stiff result, chines stiffer than factory, but a heavier boat.
Before I started and since I didn't know where I was going, I cut some short 6" mini cell strips and GFlexed on some glass tape and let it fully cure.
I tested to destruction the strips and found that the result would bend to 30 d flex and torque about the same. The GFlex bonded very well to the Minicell and wouldn't separate. It had to be ripped off.
Anyways, it sounds like you have a blue sky project. Good luck.
Last edited by Einar on Sun Oct 09, 2011 6:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
... take a circular saw and cut it cross ways in two parts. Remove a small section of some of the worst wear, perhaps a foot or so. Next overlap the two parts a bit, by removing a the appropriate inner layer from one, and vice-versa for the other. And finally glass over inside-n-out, and paddle the hades out of it ???
Or perhaps Viking Funeral for Halloween
^~^~^ different strokes ~ for different folks ^~^~^
I repaired a boat that was trashed once before.....I won't do it again....but if I was to try it again, I would use g-flex and kevlar with the outer layers being s-glass. The trouble with your project is that your boat will be delaminated throughout and there is probabley not any good hull left to work with and the more you cut away looking for good hull the harder it is to fix properly. So If it were me I would just patch it quick and dirty with watever you have on hand and look for a new boat.....I've heard that you can get a good buck for chuncks of yellow detonator royalex on ebay
Quite a while back I posted a fairly involved description of my preffered repair method for large patches on sandwich-type materials... the basic gist is to use expanding urethane foam to fill all the voids, then sand back to the desired shape of the hull and cover.
It's not a dissimilar idea to that of the minicell slice filling, but would be simultainiously easier and more time consuming to achieve the same standard of repair.
Kevlar-Glass with g-flex would be the easiest covering, but chemically welded ABS might be better if you're able to obtain sheets of it and the solvent to bond it.
Joshua Kelly - "More George Smiley than James Bond"
CBoats Moderator - Not necessarily representing the CBoats staff though...(I'll use words like "moderator", "We" and "CBoats" to make it clear when I am)
Fixing up a delaminated canoe has it's limits but it bugs me to send a 90% good hull to the dump. If I can get a "new to canoer" out in a hull on easy gr 3 and having fun for zero dollars then it's worth it.
I tell them to "just bring home the seat and the airbags", getting rid of the rewrecked hull is their problem.
Also, '8)', I'm creating a market to unload my 2nd hand hulls into.
I had some delaminations on my canoe--more like a blister than a wide open sore.
I drilled 1/8 inch holes into the blister, being careful not to penetrate the hull [most of the time]; injected West Epoxy [notG/Flex]; placed a 25lb sand bag on the area and left it overnight. I now have several holes that squirt like clams on the beach. I plan to plug them with Legos dissolved in acetone. Should end up looking like zits across the bottom, but the fish won't care.
Hmmm, my plan is just the ABS slurry. No foam, no minicell, no glass or epoxy, just ABS. Worked well (with glass on the inside forthat one) to repair a big blow-out in the impact-heavy bow.
My question is, when to deal with it? I was recently hosing off my Outrage and noticed a tell-tale hollow sound, yup, a spot along the chine is squishy.
Part of me says: "Better get in there now and fix it while it's small and manageable".
Part of me says: "Ah, it's just a small soft spot, might as well ride it out and deal with later if it becomes a real problem."
And the part I'll listen to says: "Well, you don't have any time for boat repair projects, and if you did there's stuffin line first, and you've got another boat anyhow, so let it rot until you're ready to give it to Einar!" (Just kidding Einar, however/whenever I patch it up, we'll hang onto it for Tanis paddle again eventually. Like your Viper 12, it's not worth selling, but it's a good loaner in the meantime.)
Why not gauge out the bad and replace with layers of ABS milkshake instead of all the fancy variations with glassing etc?
My experience with various epoxies (haven't tried G-flex yet) is that they are too brittle.
philcanoe wrote:
... take a circular saw and cut it cross ways in two parts. Remove a small section of some of the worst wear, perhaps a foot or so. Next overlap the two parts a bit, by removing a the appropriate inner layer from one, and vice-versa for the other. And finally glass over inside-n-out, and paddle the hades out of it ???
I say cut the middle section out, cut the gunwales down, and make a kids boat- since you were asking about that.
Viking Funeral for Halloween
