A fiberglass boat is typically molded in two sections: the hull and the deck. Most of the furniture and machinery are installed inside the open hull before the deck goes on-like filling a box before putting on the lid.
If you stay off the rocks and don’t smash into the dock, the hull has a pretty good life… comfortable in the water and always half in the shade. door installation contractors Vancouver WA The deck, on the other hand, is born into a life of abuse. It sits out in the sun like a piece of Nevada desert. It is assaulted by rain, pollution, and feet. It is eviscerated by openings, pierced by hardware, and pried by cleat and stanchion.
You might think that to stand up to such treatment, decks are as strongly built as the hull they cover. You’d be wrong. Weight carried low in a boat has little detrimental impact. Boatbuilders can make the hull as thick as they want, but weight carried high reduces stability. A disk must first be light; strength is defined by “strong enough.” As a result, the need for deck repair is far more common than the need for repairs to the hull.
Deck repair can also be more complicated than hull repair (but not necessarily “harder”). While the surface of a hull is flat or uniformly curved and relatively featureless, a deck is a landscape of corners, angles, curvatures, and textures. Damage often extends under deck-mounted hardware. Backside access may be inhibited by a molded headliner. And to provide stiffness without weight, deck construction generally involves a core.
Stress cracks can be identified by their shapea . Typically they run parallel or fan out in starburst pattern. They appear in molded corners, such as around the perimeter of the cockpit sole or where the deck intersects the cabin sides. dry rot remodeling long beach WA There is weakness in the corner. Parallel cracks also show up on either side of bulkheads or other stiffening components attached to the inside surface of the hull or deck. The flexing stresses are concentrated at such hard spots causing the gelcoat, and sometimes the underlying laminate, to crack.
Starburst cracking can also be caused by impact, dropping an anchor, or a heavy winch handle on deck. (Exterior impact may instead result in concentric cracks like the pattern of a target.)
Starburst cracks are caused by flexing when the movement centers at a point rather than along an edge. The most common starburst cracking extends from beneath stanchion mounts, where literally the deck is levered up around the socket mounting holes.