Howdy all,

I've just added a page to my website that shows the process of replacing the bottoms of our two PD Racers when we realised the bottom ply we had bought had too many voids and was really brittle.

We ended up replacing the 4mm jarrah exterior ply with 6mm gaboon - which eliminated all problems. That was a year ago and I've been really slack about putting the photos up. The link below has all the photos and some explanation.

The method I used was taught to me by my friend Alan Downes who used it to do major repairs to racing Moths overnight during championship series.

Having a completely glued structure has several advantages - but here the purpose is to show how fast it is possible to do a repair. I replaced the entire bottom of each boat in one day - one day each that is. This meant that the other boat was always available to go sailing in!

You can see the article here
http://www.storerboatplans.com/Faq/fastrepair.html

I have also updated my boatbuiding and repair FAQ with a new section for boat repair (about half the material is from stuff I have written on this forum. I've also improved the links between the boat repair articles and the method articles so the obvious information is close at hand.
MIK