Starting On The Cabin Top

Last weekend I decided it was time we started prepping for painting the cabin top. On the aft face in the cockpit there was some cracking of the paint and underlying substrate on the outside edge on the radius where it curved down, and while I had theories on the cause of this I was not entirely sure what I was getting myself into when I started grinding them out.

Fortunately, for the most part, my ideas were right. The outside edge of the cabin top was formed by large cleats running fore-aft and athwartships on the outside edge, and timber laminate had then been bent around these to form the curve. This had subsequently been sheathed over with fibreglass cloth, though I suspect that was probably not original. Over time sections of the fibreglass had de-laminated slightly from the underlying timber along the curve, and had then cracked. These simply needed to be ground out, feathered and then filled and faired with epoxy fairing compound.

Unfortunately we did find one small ugly; on the aft starboard corner there was the remains of an old termite nest that had eaten into the end of the cleat and worked its way about 15cm forward through the cabin top and similarly inboard. Initial thoughts of "oh shit now it becomes a major exercise" turned out to be unfounded, with only the very corner of the cleat needing to be cut away, meaning I didn't have to open the cabin top right up.

I flooded the area with saturating epoxy timber preservative, injecting it into every little nook and cranny, and then built up the ground out sections before finishing with an epoxy fairing coat. Purists may recoil in horror that I did not cut it all out and rebuild it from scratch using only timber, but the damage was simply too minor to warrant the huge amount of labour that would involve.

Grinding out the delaminated glass, and opening up the corner.

Termite tunnels in the underlying timber opened up. The big hole I cut out to see inside, and is directly above a large through-bolt fixing the cleat to the cabin superstructure. 

I had to open up at the base to get in to cut out the manky timber in the end of the cleat before then saturating the whole area with epoxy timber preservative. If you look closely you can see the pattern of the dynel sheathing through worn paint. 

I'll post some more pics once I've finished fairing everything.

Even though I've started on the prep work, I doubt we will paint the cabin top until after Easter, as we still want to be using the boat as much as possible. Also, we just can't decide on whether to keep the green, go for a (NZ) traditional blue, or just do a nice safe white. All opinions submitted will be considered...