You know the one that Liam had to remove because it was a bit spongy and had a crack in the visible rear edge?
Well this week during his lunch hours Liam has been busy working away on it to get it ready to put back on the boat.
His first task was whittling away all of the rotten inner ply strengthener. This was sodden and providing no strength what so ever hence why the step had become spongy and had started to crack the gel coat. Rather concerningly this has been like this but getting worse since we have owned the boat from five years old. We should really have investigated this earlier as we could have saved a lot of work now.
Anyway the next task having removed the ply was to clean the gel coat shell and reglass some fibregalass matting into the shell to give it some strength.
The picture above is the step upside down with its first coat of new matting and resin applied, waiting to be trimmed down to shape. Next was the task of applying some new marine ply stringers to add some strength to the step.
All being well and if all goes to plan on Monday the inside of the step will be ready for a coat of flow coat to seal the area and give it a presentable finish.
At the weekend we will pick up a can of gel coat filler, (luckily the filler produced by Plastic Padding is a very very close colour match to Naughty-Cal's gel coat) and on Tuesday or Wednesday the crack in the rear lip of the step will be repaired and the whole step treated to a good polish ready to reinstall next weekend.
It's all starting to come together.
With the step back in place the next big job for Liam is taking the stern drive off and taking it to work to replace the worn shaft, replace the damaged seals and give the whole drive a new coat of paint.
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