1992 Sport Floor Replacement

Thanks for the input. I wasn't thinking about the fiberglass thickness. I haven't started cutting the primary yet.

I used some house jacks I had to support the side of the boat. Can't lift it off the trailer, but it feels much stiffer.


I used some clamps and a compass to mark the secondary stringer and fit it in the boat.


I got some CPES on the parts I have made so far.

That's good to know. I am still at the beginning of the learning curve. My "peanut butter" wasn't quite the right consistency. Too thin, then probably a little too thick.

You can lay up multiple layers wet.

He's only at the taping stage so he's far from the final coating. A little dust won't kill you since you'll want to lightly sand before glassing over again anyway.

I did like you are, did all the taping in one stage. With too many layers it makes keeping everything in place a nightmare. I don't know how anyone could take and cap a stringer in one shot.

More coffee.....my comments were towards primaries and he's on secondaries.

I'm having flashbacks of the crappy taping and resin blobs on my secondaries. They came out with my foot and a vacuum.

I got one stringer in and started cutting the primary on the port side out. A 4.5" angle grinder just isn't big enough. With the angle of the hull I couldn't get much of a cut on the back side and it doesn't go all the way through in the bilge. Looks like I will have to go back to the oscillating tool to get it out. That is for another time. Having a garage big enough to fit it would help tremendously.

I had to cut to the very bottom of the stringers in mine and then use a crow bar and pry it up carefully without damaging the hull.

Eric Lavine used to swear by the sawzall, he said the blade would follow the curve of the hull.   might be worth a try if your stringers are well bonded

I cut the glass with a cutting blade on my grinder then used a crow bar and a hammer and carefully pried the floor up a few inches at a time. I got the starboard side up in one piece doing this. The port side didn't come up as good as it was a lot more rotted. I've learned a lot of lessons through this but I finished putting the last glass down on the new floor this past weekend. Motor mount is in and hopefully I'll be putting the engine back in this week.

I spent a ton of hours on it but I'm fortunate enough to be able to do it at my house so I was able to work on it a couple hours every day after work. I did get the engine installed two days ago and I got it aligned and everything hooked up yesterday. I even took the belts off and fired it up for a few seconds before I fogged it and shut it down again for the winter. Thankfully everything was fairly easy considering some of the horror stories I've read. I still have to lay carpet and reinstall the interior but that's not too bad of a job.

As far as prying, you can go a lot lower on cutting those stringers then you would think without cutting a hole in the boat. Again, I ended up recutting once I realized that and then used a two pound hammer and beat a crow bar under the stinger to pry it up. I was scared I was going to damage the hull but I was so frustrated by that point that I didn't care. Fortunately these boats are way stronger then I thought. No damage and I eventually got the stringer on out. I wish I was closer to you, I'd gladly come help.

I got some more work done on the stringers last week. I decided that since I had some support under the boat cutting one primary and one secondary out on opposite sides would be OK. I figured out after 1 day of trying to cut the primary out with a sawzall that the area around the ski locker was still going to be impossible to get with just that. I decided to get a 7" grinder and a couple of cutting discs from Harbor Freight. Best $50 I have spent. I had the port primary the rest of the way out in no time. Then I went to work on the starboard secondary and I looked at the time and it took less than an hour to get it out. I still had a lot of clean up to do, but to anyone else starting on your job, get a large grinder as well as a 4.5" one. It would have saved me a lot of time.

Thanks to some reading on the forum here I picked up a diamond wheel for grinding as well. That made the grinding a lot easier. Once I had the main part of the stringers out I could see that I still had more cutting I could do, which saved grinding time as well.. Once I was ready for it, the diamond wheel was aggressive and got the main stuff out of the way so I was mainly just cleaning up with the 36 grit flap discs. With family stuff and still getting the right methods down, below is how far I got.


I also saw some interesting things. First, I noticed these holes before, but never took much time to examine them. They are where the floor meets the side of the boat. No wonder the foam was wet. Anyone else noticed these on their boat? I assume this is factory...


The other thing was that I cut out part of the plywood under the driver seat base and found this.

There were two pieces of plywood screwed together. Some of the screws dug into the hull a little bit because of how it slopes up. Maybe someone has done some partial work on the floor before? Oh well, it is all part of the process.

I wanted to make sure I got to good fiberglass. Maybe I went a little overboard.

Another weekend and a few more lessons learned. First, 2x10s would have been better than 2x8s. Since I am going with a plywood floor they will work for the main stringers, but I had to be extra careful shaping the bottom.

Second lesson is I should have measured the distance between the bolts on the back of the cradle before I removed it. Actually building a spacer that will maintain that distance like I am planning to do now would have been better. Live and learn.

Finally, I found some stuff at Home Depot called EZ Strip that is doing a better job of removing carpet glue. Still a lot of elbow grease required, but the Goof Off evaporated too fast.

It is the distance between the studs on the cradle that support the transmission. To keep everything parallel, it appears the dimension should be 22-1/8". I took a picture of what I am talking about, but I haven't had time to download it and from my phone, through the website doesn't seem to work.

The cradle is not straight when unbolted. I briefly looked at the mount on the transmission and didn't immediately see a way to adjust the width so that if these two studs are too close or too far apart then that could create some difficulty.