After hacking away at punk flotation foam for awhile, we assessed the situation and our process. All this foam is no fun - in fact it's hard work. This picture shows better how wet this stuff is. It's mind boggling, since this boat has been dry for years. The boat was covered under a ventilated tarp for 3 years and then sat in dry storage of the warehouse for another 7 months or so. It's still soaking wet! The only way to truly dry it, short of ripping everything up, would be some decent holes ontop the deck to evaporate water out. But we don't want to wait and hope. We're taking it all out, saturated foam gone once and for all.
This is the way to do it - after struggling for a while with big pry bars, we came across a couple of shovels in the building. Flat nosed garden spade shovels would probably work best; we used what was on hand, pointed long handled shovels. As we picked up steam the foam kept a rolling- so fast that it meant constant trips to the dumpster. And these buckets of water soaked foam were not light either. Good tunes kept us motivated as TJ scoured out foam from every corner and I trudged between bright work zone and the quiet, cold winter night darkness of the dumpster.
A few hours in and things were beginning to clean up. We shoveled the ankle deep rubble into big trash cans. Now the stringers and hull began to peak through.
The foredeck area was perhaps the one spot of the boat in good condition with no soft spots. Nonetheless, we opted to cut this out as well. We want to evacuate as much wet foam as possible. Also, as we exposed more of the stringers, we conclusively agreed they desperately needed some TLC. With foredeck extracted we could access foam, stringers and main deck installation. TJ and I also agreed it may be nice to include a foredeck locker in the rebuild. Since the deck is in good shape, we're hanging onto the piece we extracted.
Now that looks much better. We even dug out any accessible areas below the gunwales. Any foam that felt dry to the touch on top was always wet on the bottom when we popped it out. It was particularly built up around the stringers as you might imagine. Improved design will certainly include some limber holes through the stringers to let the moisture drain into the bilge and out.
I wish we could put this dumpster on a scale - I bet we pulled out a between 500-1000 lbs out of that boat in just foam. It truly filled about 3/4 of the dumpster in the above picture.
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