Port Stringer

Spent the afternoon glassing the after section of the Port main Stringer. I am always amazed at how long it takes. It took 3-1/2 hours of continues work to glass in this part. There are 6 layers in each 2' long section. The glass is 50" long to wrap from 7" on the hull up the inside, across the top, down the outside to finish with 6 inches on the hull again. So each piece is 8 Square feet and there are 6 pieces in each section which means that there are nearly 50 Square feet of material to cover 2 lineal feet of stringer. That makes me feel a little better about what I accomplished....

View from the main salon down into the engine room showing the port main stringer.You can see the Shaft coupling over the grey water tank at the aft end of the engine room. I am going to add s little section the width of from outside yo outside of the main stringers and back to the shower bulkhead to the engine room space. That way I will be able to get to the stuffing box from inside the engine room rather than some little hole in the cabin sole, which actually would be inside the shower in the aft head.....

View of the inside of the main stringer viewed from the bilge. The black marks you see are marks I made on the dry glass to line it up with the top edge of the stringer.
Sorry for the fuzzy pictures, I was out there at night with the flash.

Outside of the main stringer. You can see where the 2 pieces of glass joined about half way along (whitesh vertical line on side of stringer.)
I staggered the joints in the glass by 3".

Here is a shot of where one of the gussets was glassed to the outer stringer. The black at the bottom of the picture is partially rotten stringer. The builder installed all the framing timbers first then tried to glass over all of them. That resulted in multiple "holes" at the inside corners where water could get in. The way they did it the water was able to get into the stingers. If they had glassed the stringers in first and then glassed the gussets and bulkheads in afterwards the stringers would have bee sealed. I am correcting this slowly, one joint at a time. That is why I decided to tear the gussets out, glass the main stringer in and then replace the gussets. I will also be replacing the 1" think Mahogany timber with 1-1/2" thick fiberglass reinforced foam panels. Won't matter if it does leak then...