Replacing Cabin Stringer

I guess my day was pretty productive. The first part of the day I was on a fiberglass cloth hunt. West Marine is way too proud of theirs and I need a lot of it. I think they wanted something like $300 bucks for a 10 yard roll of 50” wide 12 oz. cloth. I knew someone in town had to have the stuff cheaper. I went to 3 different places until I found what I wanted. One of the first two guys wanted to sell me chopped strand mat and was trying to convince me that it was stronger than cloth. Either he's an idiot, or he thinks I'm an idiot, or someone bequeathed him a thousand yards of the stuff and he really, really wants to get rid of it. Either way I wasn't buying. The other of the first two places I stopped proclaimed to be a boat shop, but what I found inside was an outboard motor museum tended by a cantankerous curator who would rather be fiddling with gears than talking to me about fiberglass. I've never seen anything like the place. It was literally a maze of disassembled motors (some of which I'm sure were older than me) and precariously stacked boxes of spare parts. I suppose if you ever need a part for some obscure and obsolete outboard built in 1962, he's your guy.

I think my third and final stop fell straight out of the sky from heaven. It's no more than 5 miles from my house, their only business is building fiberglass component parts for industrial equipment, two of the employees were eager to talk to me about my boat and offer advice, they had rolls and rolls of every type of fiberglass I could ask for, and they only wanted $10 a yard for the stuff I wanted. ...Sweet! There may be other things I need from West Marine, but when it comes to fiberglass cloth, they can go jump in a lake.

I spent the rest of the day working on replacing stringers and crawling in and out of the boat a thousand times. I swear to god, I need two sets of power tools. One set to keep in the boat and one set to keep in the shop. The boat and the shop are only 150 feet apart from each other, but every time I turn around, if I'm in the shop and I need the jig saw, you can bet it's in the boat. If I'm in the boat and I need the orbital sander, you can bet it's in the shop. This goes on, and on, all day long. Add to that the fact that the boat's deck is 13 feet in the air, and by the end of the day I've climbed an Eiffel tower worth of steps - or so it feels, anyway. I don't think I can honestly justify two sets of power tools, but I'm definitely doubling up on the cheaper stuff. I don't want to have to crawl back in the boat because I forgot a box knife or a tape measure. There will be boat tools and shop tools, and a strict law of apartheid enacted.

All bitching aside, I did get a lot done today. I cut one of the large stringers in the main cabin out, built a pattern for a new one and got it cut and laminated together. It's really only costing about $50 in materials to replace the large stringers, but the labor and waiting on epoxy to dry is what eats up a day. But then again, I'm not working feverishly, either. I have the radio on, and I take lots of smoke breaks and coffee breaks, and I work at a comfortable pace that allows me to enjoy what would otherwise be hard labor.

Unfortunately, getting the old stringer out was a snap. I say unfortunately because had it been stuck down properly it should have been a pain in the ass to remove it. That was not the case at all. Once I ground through the outer fiberglass with an angle grinder, it virtually popped out on its own. That turned out to be a blessing in part, though, because I was able to use most of the old stringer as a pattern for the new one.

Before I removed the old stringer I jigged up a brace that ran across the top of the stringer and reached to each side of the hull. I temporarily tabbed a block of wood with polyester resin at each end of the brace so I could reposition the new stringer in exactly the same position and height as the old one.





With the old stringer out, I took it to the shop and worked on making a pattern for the new one. Because the old stringer stayed mostly intact, this was a simple matter of wrapping and clamping a thin piece of wood around the bottom edge of it.





Once I had my pattern drawn on the new plywood, it was a simple matter of cutting it out with the jigsaw.



I cut the two halves I needed to make one stringer and laminated them together with epoxy.





The only thing left to do now is seal it and glass it in the boat (that's all, huh? Yeah, figuring in time for the epoxy to cure, that will take all day). Only 7 more to go!