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SKEETER HAWK PROJECT
PART 5
'The Jigsaw Puzzle Project'
 With the inner hull of the boat now replaced with encapsulated marine plywood and foam, we were ready to replace the actual flooring of the Skeeter.
There were a couple of alternatives. We could go to a major fiberglass repair facility or even a boat manufacturer and have a new floor sprayed in with a chopper gun. Or, we could reinstall the old floor.
We chose to do the latter for two reasons. First, the original seat pedestals were still attached to the old floor and, second, the old floor was in very good condition. As we had cut the old floor our in sections, we now had to figure which piece went where and how to get them solidly back onto the sub-floor material.
What we did was sand off the back of the original floor to remove all old resin and wood residue. Then, we put resin and fiberglass matting on the topside of the sub-floor and placed a piece of the original flooring down on that. With the help of some heavy concrete blocks to compress the pieces together, the top flooring was very tightly and securely sealed to the sub-floor.
After the original floor had been re-installed in this manner, we went around a sealed all of the old screw holes in the flooring. Then, we mixed resin and sealed all the cut lines where we had removed the old floor with the saber saw and Dremel tool cutter disk. It looks a bit like Frankenstein all sewn back together, but the floor is back in place and sealed tighter than a drum. Pretty good job, if I do say so myself.
There is one non-original modification the old Skeeter. I added a depthfinder transducer cup at the rear of the boat. Since the inner hull contains wood, a transducer would not read through the hull from the inside. So, before I put the encapsulated marine plywood in pace in the inner hull space, I place a 2-inch PVC pipe piece in pace and glassed it to the glass hull. The marine plywood was then cut to fit around the pipe and it was foamed and sealed. By placing a little water in the bottom of the pipe piece, the transducer will be able to shoot and receive its signals directly through glass only and will work great.
Our final step here was to wash out the boat, clean it good and prepare it for an interior and floor paint job. That's coming next, when the rains stop sand the humidity goes down a bit.
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