Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Transom Drain Hole

After rebuilding the aft bulkhead, I thought I would build a PVC pipe drain running from the cockpit through the aft well to the transom drain hole. When I realized that would leave the aft well with no drain unless I had an off set drain somehow built in, I just decided that the original design would be fine. But I needed to re-glass the bulkhead and well floor (the inside of the hull) in order to seal it all. So I pulled the old drain hole tube. What a mess. The wood in the hole had also rotted. On top of that, the stringer in the well had also rotted. So I went to West Marine in Tempe and bought a new Drain Tube. It was 3" long so I had to cut it with a tube cutter to fit. I scraped out all the rotten wood inside the transom drain hole and cut the stringer back 3 inches. I scraped the rotted wood out of the stringer as well.










I mixed up a batch of resin, hardener and 403 filler. I filled the void in the transom drain hole and the stringer as well as the space left open by the removed portion of the stringer. Then I wrapped the new tube with 2 wraps of cloth wetted out with the filler mix. Shoved it all through the transom from the rear and spread out the cloth inside the well to make a decent seal. once this was done, I tapped the tube from the rear with a hammer and smoothed out the resin/cloth once more inside the well.







                                         Ready for glassing the well with cloth & then paint.