TDB 14 Classic - "Easy" Fix

[Noah Shaver]

A little "progress" over the weekend. Man this balsa core sure is bonded well to the glass. I need to remove the balsa that is exposed in this picture and I plan to stop there. Any further repairs to the balsa core near the bow can be done from the floor side in the cockpit if needed.

Unfortunately I found several seams in the fiberglass floor that have cracked over the years. It looks like instead of glassing the boat floor from bow to stern they glassed it from port to starboard. There was very little overlap in these joints so some of them have gave way over the years. This is likely yet another possible point of water intrusion

I plan on marking each place there is a crack in the glass and fixing them all once I get the core replaced and the hull flipped back over. I will probably end up re-glassing the entire floor in the cockpit.

I had previously said that the floor fiberglass and the hull fiberglass appeared to be the same thickness, but now that I have popped through the floor fiberglass I can see it's very thin. It's just a layer of woven cloth directly on the core and then a layer of CSM on top of that on the floor side. That's it.

Now that I've gotten this deep into it I can tell that these older TDB's were very poorly constructed. Very thin glass and a multitude of points for possible water intrusion.

 

[Steve Sanford]

Good morning, Noah~

Interesting to watch your Voyage of Discovery....

I was especially surprised to read: It's just a layer of woven cloth directly on the core and then a layer of CSM on top of that on the floor side. That's it. That order seems completely upside down. I like CSM for its ability to stick to things - and cloth for a smooth surface. I would have put the CSM on the core, then embdded the cloth into the wetted CSM. Go figure!

All the best,

SJS

 

[Noah Shaver]

Steve, what I suspect is that the balsa core material that TDB used had a Scrim cloth on the backside (floor side) holding it together. They simply shot their chopper gun over this with chopped strand to create a CSM layer over the scrim cloth. Very very thin overall glass layer on the floor side

 

[Anthony Babich]

Steve, what I suspect is that the balsa core material that TDB used had a Scrim cloth on the backside (floor side) holding it together. They simply shot their chopper gun over this with chopped strand to create a CSM layer over the scrim cloth. Very very thin overall glass layer on the floor side

That is all hand laid no chopper gun back then but you are correct the Scrim is on the backside floor. The flooring was made to flex slightly underway to ease the stress while the balsa at the time was meant to be the actual support for that floor. The 17's are built differently with marine ply and fused to the floor itself which 30+ years later has proven to last much longer.

I would remove that all like you have and use Nidaboard with woven woven matting. Unless you're keeping the boat for another 20+ years you're digging into a complete floor / hull rebuild further than that. It's VERY thin 1/4 maybe? I'd go that route seal her back up tie in the matting to those channels you mentioned, sand exterior apply a finish coat & send it!

Great work bud unfortunately back then this was a practical way to make em! Thankfully all synthetic's nowadays so these ole 2025 classics in the next 50 years will be easier for the next generation if the birds exist then!

 

[Noah Shaver]

That is all hand laid no chopper gun back then but you are correct the Scrim is on the backside floor. The flooring was made to flex slightly underway to ease the stress while the balsa at the time was meant to be the actual support for that floor. The 17's are built differently with marine ply and fused to the floor itself which 30+ years later has proven to last much longer.

I would remove that all like you have and use Nidaboard with woven woven matting. Unless you're keeping the boat for another 20+ years you're digging into a complete floor / hull rebuild further than that. It's VERY thin 1/4 maybe? I'd go that route seal her back up tie in the matting to those channels you mentioned, sand exterior apply a finish coat & send it!

Great work bud unfortunately back then this was a practical way to make em! Thankfully all synthetic's nowadays so these ole 2025 classics in the next 50 years will be easier for the next generation if the birds exist then!

I wish I could talk to the fella that hand laid that CSM in the floor with little to no overlap and give him a piece of my mind

All jokes, mostly. We sure have came a long way in materials and construction methods in the last 30+ years, and I understand at that point in time this was the best way to do things.

I talked to Tom earlier about a couple things with the boat. As always he is a pleasure to talk to and a wealth of knowledge on the TDB's.

He made a good point that the glass won't take to that inside corner of the channels in the hull. I will build some fillets with epoxy in that inside corner to be sure the glass conforms to that more gentle slope.

He also encouraged me to tackle the transom replacement while I had it flipped like this and glass everything back at one time. Basically, the plan is going to be to leave about 3 inches of material on three sides, the port, starboard, and the top side where the seam between the hull and the deck are. On the bottom side I will cut it out all the way to the floor which I've already torn out. This will allow me to slide my new coosa transom in as one solid piece from bottom to top.

One good piece of info that came from our conversation was on the subject of sealing the seam between the hull and deck around the rest of the hull. It's common to see guys blame this seam on the water intrusion issues and wet flotation foam. Tom let me know that this is purely misinformation and this seam cannot leak. It is fiberglassed on the inside of the deck at that seam.

 

[Noah Shaver]

A little progress update. The balsa core floor demo is complete! Man I won't miss that a bit.

Finished that up early Saturday morning and decided to go ahead and remove the motor board and tear into the transom.

This transom felt rock solid, but as I tore it apart I could see that it was completely dilapidated. The plywood core was soaking wet and all of it was rotted. Started chipping away at removing that wet plywood and go it about halfway done.

I will finish the demo of that old plywood this week and start ordering materials to get this thing back in tip top shape.

I'm going to have to get creative with clamps when it comes time to replace this transom board and floor core. Most of the floor I can just weight down, but the margins I left for a scarf are going to be tricky. May end up drilling some relief holes and injecting some epoxy in those holes with a caulk gun.

Floor demo complete:



Motor board removed and transom fiberglass removed to expose rotted plywood:



Current status of the transom demo: