Next was the area of the keel that kept leaking year after year. Everything questionable had to be ground out. I rough ground out the area and the yard would later grind off more before re glassing the damaged area.
You can see the cracks in the glass that allowed the water to seep in and out
Next stop the leading edge of the keel
In this picture you can clearly see that under the layers of glass the keel seam was compromised as the calking between the half’s was no longer working.
As you can see there is quite a bit of glass wrapped around this keel seam at the leading edge of the keel however if it does not stick to the lead it’s not really doing much. On the upper left picture you can see that the lead is white with salt that was in between the lead and glass. The large piece of glass on the lower right picture fell off while I was grinding the seam.(Marked with white X) If you look at the picture on the lower right you can see that the top of the keel isn’t even close to matching the bottom of the keel stub. (Red circle)
There was about 1 inch of filler material between the two pieces in order to mate the two correctly. ( Marked with red )
On to removing the keel from the keel stub
On to removing the keel from the keel stub
When this project started I thought there would be a tough battle to get the keel to separate from the hull. I’ve heard stories of hours and hours of labor spent trying to pry the two apart. When the time came to lift the hull off the keel the keel was just barely holding onto the hull. We lifted the boat about 3 or 4 inches up off the fixture that was to hold keel and in some places you could see right thru the seam. A small wedge was placed strategically in the seam and one whack was all it took to remove the keel from the hull. The whole process took less than an hour.
