Subject: 31 ft Halter Offshore Fisherman Deck Repair
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000Ok.. here it is.. I have read a great number of the comments and have a question of my own.
The Deck on my boat is encapsulated 1/2 inch marine plywood..it had approx. 1/4 inch of fiberglass on each side of the plywood.. (totaling 1/2 in) 75% of the wood was water logged (after I cut it is bled water) so needless to say the decking weighed a ton.. ..I have decided to replace the deck with new pressure treated wood.. NOW.. I read in one of you Q&A 's that you did not like encapsulating the wood.. to let it breathe...only after treating it with CPES.. did i read right?? I need the toughness of glass to hold up to scuba tanks dropping on the deck and other misc. dive stuff ,(yes this is a Dive charter boat).. what I am planning on is treating the wood with CPES and just putting glass on the top.. do I use your laminate stuff in place of the resin to wet the cloth?? and if I don't .. would a polyester resin stick well enough to work? Hope I got my questions through ok..Thanx
Lee
Any core material adds stiffness to the structure. Plywood is handy because it is cheap, quick and easy to use. If you put 'glass on the top only, you will not get quite the stiffness as you would with 'glass on both sides. If you bump up the thickness of the plywood or the top layer of 'glass, or both, you should get stiffness equal to what it was originally. Treat the inside (bottom) of the plywood with one coat of CPES and some paint, and it will still be able to "breathe" somewhat. More than one coat of CPES will seal the wood entirely. At that point you might as well fiberglass it. Our Layup & Laminating epoxy resin is the best resin that you can use for fiberglassing, in our opinion. It has greater strength AND flexibility than any other fiberglass resin on the market. You can put polyester resin onto OUR epoxy resins, our resins provide better adhesion to the wood than polyester alone. Epoxy resins in general, and our epoxies especially, are a much better material than polyester, but there is no problem putting polyester onto our epoxies.
I hope this answers your questions. Please let me know if I missed any, or if you have follow up questions.
Doc