iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

Day-1 of the project is described here, and the next installment is here.

Work kept me out of the shop Monday and Tuesday this week, and the 4-Lakes ice-boat club meeting kept me away on Wednesday. Finally on Thursday I was able to get working on the "big crack"...

The first step was to mask off everything but the wide areas of the main crack. The other splits and areas will be vacuum infused with glue later.

The approach wasn't anything unusual. Since the crack was wide enough to see through, I simply worked neat WEST epoxy down inside the gap using a 1" brush. The boat was on its side, so gravity was also helping. I checked to make sure there was epoxy dripping out the underside and then worked more Cotton-fiber thickened epoxy in there. Once the entire length of the crack was filled, I used some scraps of 1/4" plywood (wrapped in wax-paper) to clamp the movable top part of the sideboard in-plane with the solid bottom section.

With the clamps in place, I checked to make sure the top and bottom were in-line and that there was epoxy oozing out everywhere. I scraped and wiped the drips and excess epoxy from inside the boat and on the side panel. With everything cleaned up, I then put a slight mound of epoxy/cotton along the crack, checked it every few minutes, and added more anyplace where the glue was still working its way into the crack.

The clamps from the top:

Underneath, you can see the two pieces of plywood supporting the side-board:

A closeup of a section of the crack where there was a noticeable gap to be filled with epoxy:

Three more hours for a total of nine so far...