We traced a bad leak in the quarterberth to the port side track, and it was bad enough to need to be addressed immediately. Jonny pulled up both tracks. On the starboard side we got away with drilling, coring out the balsa, and filling the plugs with epoxy before redrilling new holes and mounting the new track from Garhauer (1-1/4″ 10′ long). On the port side we weren’t so lucky. Jonny discovered that a 1′ x 10′ section of the balsa was rotted out, so he cut the top side of the deck off, chiseled out all the balsa, cut a new piece of marine plywood to fit, and glassed over the top with epoxy and knytex (great fiberglass available from TAP plastics–layer of cloth backed stitched to mat–good for building up thickness fast). I laboriously ground down and faired it afterwards (Quik Fair is my fairing product of choice for this task). Initially I was trying to do my grinding with a grinding blade on our 4″ grinder, but the radius is too small for quick, pretty work. So we bought a variable speed 5″ Milwaukee grinder, took the guard off, and put a 7″ sanding disc on it. I bought some 36 grit discs for it, and ran it at low rpms. This is DEFINITELY the tool to use for this job. We painted over the work with a two-part epoxy primer and we’ll finish the rest of the painting, etc when we get around to doing the rest of the deck.
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