I spent lunch time today welding up a couple of boats. The first was a 6 month old Pyranha Karnali which had been damaged after its pilot left it to run the Morriston River Race by itself. First impressions indicated that the nose of the boat has been turned up, however the hull shows no sign of deformation.
I have therefore concluded that the deck has actually been compressed. The marks to the grab handle support this and the deck isn’t quite level. During that compression the boat has been torn open. This is fairly impressive as the plastic is around 1cm thick in this area. The repair was very easy.
The second boat was a Bliss Stick Huka. The crack in the boat was pretty bad. A superficial repair had been attempted in the past and a great deal of the original plastic had receded, thinned out and deformed. This had resulted in the crack in the hull being too wide for a normal repair. To make matters worse the position of the damage didn’t allow for safe access from the inside.
I therefore decided to build up the repair with some additional material to compensate for the thinning of the old repair. Four or five passes were required before I was happy with the repair. Although this one doesn’t look very pretty it feels and sounds solid.
Repaired a Cross linked Jackson a few weeks back. Can definitely detect the difference in how the plastic reacts to heat. So far all is well and it remains watertight.