COCKPIT SEAT REPAIR

There's been a bit of a soft spot in the port cockpit seat for the past couple of years that I decided it was time to tackle.  So out came the cutting tools.  I cut the top layer of deck into pieces about 2" x 2" with a dremel tool.  In retrospect, a larger cutting tool would had made this part of the process go much more quickly, but the dremel tool worked just fine.

With a bit of cutting and prying, the top layer of fiberglass was removed.  It turns out there was quite a bit of wet balsa core.  Here's a picture of the initial area that was cut out and another of the remnants of the cut out.

As I got further into removing material, there was more wet core than I had anticipated.  The wet core wrapped around the front of the traveler.  So more fiberglass and core was removed.  In order for the new fiberglass to have something to adhere to, the existing fiberglass needed to be feathered back around the repair area.  In some areas, there really wasn't enough area around the repair to allow for a perfect feathering, so the best that could be done had to be good enough.  Here is a picture of the area ready for the new layup.

Since fiberglass work was going to happen and I'm also going to rework the traveler, I decided to fiberglass in all of the old traveler hardware mounting locations.  Areas where hardware was mounted were ground out so that they could be filled and a couple layers of fiberglass laid in to prevent the filled holes from cracking out in the future.

So all of the areas of glass work were ready to go.  New balsa core and several layers of fiberglass where cut to the proper size.  The major repair consisted of three layers of a 29 oz. biaxial fabric while the small repairs consisted of two layers of fabric.

At the large repair a layer of glass was laid over the bottom layer of existing fiberglass.  Then the perimeter areas were filled with MarGlass filler.  The new balsa core was set and mudded in at the perimeter by more MarGlass.  Then three layers of glass were installed over the top of the core.