GeoPetroPolitics

If you read Kuewa's history, you may have seen that her hull and deck were laid up in 1973. There's a good chance Islander Yachts had just completed laying up the first two-thirds of the cabin /deck laminate in October 1973 when the Arabs stopped selling oil to the US, quadrupling polyester resin prices. I think Islander must have stopped work for a while, and when they started up again, they didn't do a good enough job cleaning all the dust off the partial layup, and probably started using less resin. The result is that the inner one-third of the laminate is not bonded well to the rest of it in a lot of places, and not at all in others. I've seen this all along the starboard side at every opening so far.

I'm now working on the smaller ports forward of the big fiberglassing job. There is some more delaminated wood from water intrusion, just like further aft, along with the delaminated fiberglass. The fix for the fiberglass is to mix some thickened epoxy filler and try to stuff it into the space as best I can, then clamp. So far it's working pretty well. The new ports are clamps themselves so this will help hold things together. The short screws that held the old ports actually pried the laminate apart.

Delaminated everything.

 Drawing a paper template. The port opening was red from tape on the outside due to rain. Waterproof stucco tape leaves less reside if you can get the tape off within 24 hours or so.

The fix for the 1/8" thick delaminated wood is the same as before: chop it out and lay glass in it's place.

Five layers of X-mat.












I got the quote today from New Found Metals for the 12 opening ports, the equivalent of 5 months or so of cruising. But without them I couldn't go at all.