1980 Outrage V-20 Restoration Project

[OutrageV20]

First post after signing up but a loyal reader for years.

I've got a 1980 Outrage V-20 model Whaler that I bought when I was in college and drove it to Mass Maritime while in school plus a bunch of fishing trips but she now is in a million pieces. Will try to condense the story so it's not too long.

I was contacted to rebuild a Mariner 150 outboard, and I found it had failed in all but one cylinder which was down to 80-PSI when I checked it out. I traced the problem to the fuel tank being bad and the engine eating water.

I rebuilt the engine, and broke-in the engine. The engine owner was having a first child and offered it to me for a good price, so I ended up with it. After trying to sell the engine to a friend and pulling it out of the water, I noticed there was a couple spots on the bottom where there were small holes in the gelcoat that were always wet and dripping even a month after that last trip in the water with it. Started becoming a loyal reader here and investigated further finding lots of soft/delaminated floor so I opted to keep it and restore it myself. I ended up drilling a couple holes in the bottom of the hull to find that about two gallons of water flowed out of the hull almost instantly! We stuffed small rags into the holes after to help "Wick" anymore water out of the hull which helped, so two years later after that it's dry as a bone and I'm happy with where it is. Now the fun part!

The deck came out and was one heavy piece of material to move with my Dad, barely made it out it was so wet. Found the fill neck on the fuel tank was rotted through and the tank cavity was filled with water in the foam. We got all the foam and tank out to find quite a few spots that were soft and needed attention which have been started with the repair process. Deck was stripped and new plywood installed which came out nice, all glassed in and very sturdy.

Next I found that the "Strips" of floor between the gunwale and main deck hatch covering fuel tank were quite soft on both sides. Last summer Dad and I came up with a contraption to "Inject" epoxy into the voids to stiffen the floor so there was no more flex, this was a pain before we figured out to use a caulking gun with a tube to inject the fresh mix of epoxy all throughout the soft floor areas. We used a spade bit to drill through the edge of the floor at the lip where the main deck rests (see pics) and got passages opened for the epoxy to flow across easily. Holy crap did that work, I can jump on that floor and it's not going anywhere! While the epoxy was flowing we also opened up the holes (ALL of them) for the main deck as they were all stripped to be filled in with epoxy and some filler material to reestablish something the screws could grab.

This is where I am currently at a deciding point in the project on the hull. There is crazing that's beginning to show mostly in the rear area as well as the darn stress cracks in the non skid that were caused by the soft floor flexing. My buddy's been on my case to finish the boat (which I do want) but I want it to be really really nice and not skip over anything. How do I go about repairing these cracks and crazing while keeping the non-skid in tact? [See separate thread on gel coat additives--Moderator.] I have toyed with the idea of re-spraying the entire interior with Awl-Grip or the original gel-coat that you can get from Spectrum, neither of which I'm sure are cheap by any means but like I said, I want to do this right the first time and then meticulously maintain the entire rig.

I'm going for a really nice runner that will turn heads and be fully functional. The boats been a rack boat its whole life so it has never seen bottom paint and I'm keeping it that way. The previous owner however was not a maintenance inclined person as the boat was always stored under the knotty pines in the Cape Cod area which is why it's so faded and the wood was grey. Dad took off about 3/16-inch the gunwales to get them smooth and made a couple small repairs and "Wow" is the only thing that comes to mind when you look at them.

Every exterior fitting is to blame for the water intrusion, the [sidelight lamps] pull right out of the foam with no effort whatsoever and the bow rail was littered with sealant around each base. I've seen on YouTube that some people have custom fabricated mounts under those bases to allow something substantial for the rail to be anchored to. From the sounds of this they cut out the base area and glassed in a piece of plywood which helped distribute the load of the railing and gave the screws a solid anchoring point.

The engine is a whole different chapter for another time.

Looking forward to seeing what people respond with! Thanks in advance.

[jimh]

I am confused a bit in your narrative. You wrote:

I rebuilt the engine, and broke-in the engine. The engine owner was having a first child and offered it to me for a good price, so I ended up with it.

Is "it" the engine? Or is "it" a boat?