Re: Replacing rotted motor mounts
I just went through a mess when replacing my engine. checked the tops and sides of the fllotation boxes and they were solid and drilling yielded no wet wood... once I got the new engine ready and pulled the old one out, started to remove everything underneath and prepare to extend the existing mounts, I struck water... literally... low and behold the engine pount blocks, underlying wood and stringers all the way up were rotten or at least wet... there was water trapped in the foam at the bottom of one of the flotation boxes that literally ran out when i drilled into it. After cursing a bit, i remembered some of teh great info i had read on this board and some other places, and started taking pictures and measuring. taking measurements and pictures with a ruler in the pictres) as I went, I then ripped it apart with a crow bar, circular saw, sawz all, wood chisels and hand grinder - huge mess... Thank god the balsa core in the hullk wasn't wet - I would have burned the whole thing in the driveway right then I think. I wound up having to take the whole deck up even though it was mostly solid, because the stringers were wet and rotted underneath. I removed a pile of wet foam from under the dry on the one side... and checked everything visually after currint into the surroundign structures until i struck dry materials. Since I was putting a significantly heavier engine in and had to extend the mounting pillars (v-8, mounts on both sides), I didn't replace the large piece of wood that was in each mount bedding with another similar peice I layered mahogany, glass matt and epoxy resin into the old fiberglass shell after thoroughly cleaning it out and roughing everything up a lot for good adhesion when I put it back together. I filled in all the corners and made the initial bedding with "peanut butter" and did the top with that as well once the layers were all in. it's REALLY solid now and clearly much stiffer than it was before. It is also made of separated chambers of rot resistant wood. It took several long days of hard work to get done, but in the end i think was worth the effort... I did the stringers with marine plywood and epoxy resin filling cracks and bedding them using pl construction adhesive then glassing over it.
dig until the rotten part is gone, take pictures with a ruler along side, and then put it back together with good materials. You won't be sorry...
