Revenger build thread!!

[motorvator]

Originally Posted by Jon Fuller

Having just looked back through the pictures on this thread, I would say that whoever put those structures in, or decided how they'd be done, doesn't have a scooby doo about the subject. They're shocking! Doing it the way it was had nothing whatsoever to do with cost, and everything to do with having no f*cking idea about the subject in hand, or the loads involved. A total waste of good wood & glass.

I guess the key is, know your limits. If you don't know about something, ask someone who does, asking is usually free.

When we were doing the 32, I was asking Steve Baker stuff literally on a daily basis, because his 40 years of experience was sure to produce something good and dependable, whereas my 30 seconds, wasn't.

Must admit didn't like to say at the time but it really doesn't look anything like my one under the floor. What is the history of the build? Did it not actually come out of Revengers factory?

Must have been fun to drive. Remember my P16 having the floor part company with the hull in the middle of a race and it was amusing to say the least having a suzuki driving a tub of jelly.

Anyway gotta say James you do like giving yourself a challenge. I would put all the engine business to one side and concentrate on getting this back to straight, tidy and solid and the performance will likely be there.

[baj666]

Originally Posted by larby

As far as i know the moulds are now in sweden. I've asked around and the cost of an absolutely new hull is working out around £6k to £15k.
In the long run this would without doubt be the better option with a much higher resale value, but as a 25 year old with a baby and needing a house, i just simply can't pay out a lump sum like that.
On the other side, with my contact for glass and resin, i can rebuild the revenger bit by bit as and when i've got spare money from cash jobs and overtime. We rekoned about £500 for the materials plus my spare time to do the work.
I can get that past my girlfriend, turning up with a new hull would be a different matter! It's repair the revenger, or be without a boat for 3 years plus, hence how upset i am about the current situation!

James

you lucky fvker ....you have plenty of time to finnish the project...at least when its done you know its right and your not taking a chance on another boatys balls up..goodluck and just take your time as its a hobby not a race

[andy21]

Be a bit boring for a change Larby!

Sell the V8 and all that supercharger nonsense, have a bit of fun chainsawing the Revenger into teeny bits and then buy a Ring or Phantom 20/21 with a modest outboard and go out using it

Might be a bit run of the mill but in the long term you'd $ave £££s and would be on the water!

If you crave the loud noises, take a dremel to the exhaust

[scooby_hugh]

No andy bad plan! what he wants to do is work slowly on the revenger making it really nice and in the meantime buy my ring to race in so he can have some fun.... sorted

[dowdy]

Sunseeker 23 daycab on a 4 wheeled trailer,volvo penta duoprop 290 single inboard,2 berth cuddy up front,can cook on it ,have a crap on it and kip on it,mate brought it back from spain end of september and left it on brokerage,was asking 7k for it,will take 1500 now,hes skint,anyway good to you James?least you can get out there and play,mrs,.will prob like it too,you could always be the start boat or rescue till you get what you want.Boat is currently at Rock powerboats,phewellei,not mint,but a runner,trailer is nearly new and worth the 1500 on its own.

[larby]

Some amusing ideas there... Buying a smaller ring or phantom is out as the whole idea is for Mia to be able to come out in this too. I need the extra size for it to be safe with her in. Compared to a P21 the revenger is like a ferry!

I've cracked on with things today and got all of the balsa out back to the engine bay bulkhead. I'll be removing the rest soon as I get that bulkhead out, but my tools are at a job at the mo! Took a fair while to do, grinding the glass off in little squares and then chiselling out the balsa down to the original skin. Pretty easy to see where the water was getting in, those bits were black and stank!

It's been so satisfying to get to even this stage. A lot of the loose surrounding glass has come away with it and it's easy to see now what's still stuck and what isn't. Suddenly it doesn't seem such a mammoth task and actually seems achievable!
I'll be sorting the hull before i go anywhere near the engine, but I'm still going to be building it with the supercharger when it goes in.

Just found my camera lead so I'll put a load of pics up in a sec...

James

[larby]

Here we go, some up to date pics at last!

These first ones are from when i cut the stringers out.

Pics 1 and 2 show the hull with the stringers out, you can clearly see the balsa core running down just inside where the stringers were (it's the 7" wide raised bit).
The whole area of glass between the stringers and over the balsa is delaminating, as is the 6" glass on the outside of the stringers.

Pic 3 shows a close up of the resin the stringers were sat in. Not exactly bedded in anything, at best they were just 'stuck' to the hull.

Pic 4 shows the pile of what was the stringers after i removed them. I haven't cut them into pieces, i attempted to remove them in one piece. This is just how broken apart they were!! I think i counted 12 total breaks in one side and 11 in the other. Safe to say they were doing nothing.
The two long bits at the back are the lengths of pine that wedged the fuel tank in as it was the wrong size. The large piece of glassing to the right is just one small bit of the repair from the port side delamination, which has delaminated again, so i cut out. Not surprising really as it was laid onto dust, grit and a few random bits and bobs i found stuck inthe underside!
Thankfully there's just enough glassing stuck to keep the repair in place, I'll be reinforcing this too when i do the rest of the glassing work.

James

[larby]

These are the pics of the hull with the balsa now removed. To say it was a bit gash would be an understatement! Took me ages with a hammer and chisel and I'm itching like mad now!

1st and 2nd pics are just to show the area removed.

3rd pic is a closeup, sadly you can't see just how dry the glass underneath is, it doesn't even look like it had any resin on it!

4th pic shows what i mean about the delamination. You can see where the stringer was behind the chisel, and I've already removed the layer of glass which went over the stringer from this bit too, it just fell off when i took the stringers off. The chisel is under the glass which ran under the balsa and the rest off the hull, shows how easily it's all coming away. It's like a seperate shell inside the hull, about half of it is totally delaminated. Hard to explain really, hopefully that makes sense!

Thankfully with the balsa now removed, it's now just the darker areas of glass shown in pics 1 & 2 that are still delaminated. It shouldn't be too hard to now pry those away where necessary and grind back the rest.

Phew!

James

[Jon Holmes]

Nice going, keep up the good work.

[larby]

Cheers Jon

It's gonna be an uphill battle, but once it's done at least I'll know it's done properly and it should be one hell of a boat!

James

[larby]

Originally Posted by motorvator

Must admit didn't like to say at the time but it really doesn't look anything like my one under the floor. What is the history of the build? Did it not actually come out of Revengers factory?

I'd be interested to see a pic of yours as a comparison.
From what i know, Pete got it as a cheap 'back door' moulding from Trio, behind revenger's back. Revenger then found out about it and insisted on inspecting it before allowing their name to be put on the side. I'm not really sure what they inspected, as they signed it off as being good enough to be one of theirs and pete duly applied the revenger name.
The way it seems, I think Pete bought it as a totally bare skin, then did all the structure and further work himself. Lets just say you can see the difference in workmanship. As Jon quite rightly said, whoever did the structure in this boat didn't have the slightest clue what they were doing, and was obviously working to a very tight budget. The biggest issue seems to be that there was obviously quite some time between when the hull skin was finished, and when the structure was built in. As a result of this, the two were just 'stuck' together rather than chemically bonded as one. This, combined with the appauling workmanship, has resulted in the two layers totally seperating, giving the issues i now have.

When i bought it, there was no way for me to see any of this. The structure in the engine bay looks fine, and I couldn't see the stringers under the cockpit without cutting the floor out. I'm sure Russell had no idea about the horrors that lurked beneath either, so i don't blame him in the slightest!

Just my luck to go and buy the bloomin thing!

James

[motorvator]

Unfortunately it's four or five years ago that I went under there and didn't think to photograph at the time.

And I'm buggered if I'm pulling up the axminster silk carpet just to satisfy your curiousity

At the time I was refitting the interior and it made sense to have the floor up at the time to check tanks etc so I did. the floor is actually partially mounted in a fibreglass rebate in the inner moulding (Glassed to the outer longits) and screwed to the very substantial inner longits with battens across the belly tank.

A bit like the piccies that cudmore posted on the first page.

Oh and it doesn't have the handy access panel in the rear bulkhead. Mine's an annoying one piece arrangement

Anyway get stuck into it James and you will end up with a winner.

How are you going to true it all up?

[daren]

Originally Posted by Jon Fuller

whereas my 30 seconds, wasn't.

There you go, exaggerating again...

[Jon Fuller]

Originally Posted by daren

There you go, exaggerating again...

I know, I pondered at 15 seconds, but decided to 'show off'.

James, Huge respect! keep it up, keep the pictures coming, and don't lose momentum.

I would strongly suggest finding some way to use one piece longits if you can (not plywood!). Buying them as Douglas fir or similar would be favourite, but costly, and hard to find (it was a nightmare finding them for the 32, ended up having to take the only better or clear quarter sawn boards at 8" x 1-1/4" we cold find, which were 38' long! they were a grand. We only actually needed 29 footers) That's why the long scaff boards would be an easy and cheap way of getting contiuous straight grain in good quality structural timber, possibly in the lengths you'll need (22-23'??) You really don't want joins, and you really don't want ply. unless you have plenty of woven, or maybe some unidirectional along the top of whatever you use. I think the key to stopping this from delaminating again, is going to be making it very stiff to avoid the kind of flexing that would put the laminates under sheer loading.
Given that things aren't really as they should be, your longits are going to be doing a lot of work, so get them right.

Out of interest, was the glass over the balsa woven, or CSM?

[larby]

Yeah, scaffold boards would be ideal, the longits were quite short, 20ft tops, so should be able to find some long enough. The glass over the balsa was csm, most of the boat is apart from one layer of woven I've now found in the original skin under all this crap, you can see it in the chisel shot.

James

[Jon Fuller]

Originally Posted by larby

Yeah, scaffold boards would be ideal, the longits were quite short, 20ft tops, so should be able to find some long enough. The glass over the balsa was csm, most of the boat is apart from one layer of woven I've now found in the original skin under all this crap, you can see it in the chisel shot.

James

CSM over the balsa is utterly pointless. That layer will be put under great tension when the going gets tough, and csm's performance is shite under tension. still, not to worry now. It's a shame, as core construction has such massive benefits, if done correctly and looked after.

That minimal outer laminate must be pretty flexible! I would consider getting all that running surface ground out, feathered back to fkk all where required, then replace where you've feathered away back to original thickness, then for the majority of the running surface, run at least a couple of 900 combi's down over the whole area, with a good overlap along the centreline, extra strips (maybe 2 more 900's) along the spray rails & chines, and probably one extra over the whole area aft of the dash/bulkhead. then all ya new longits etc on top of that nice new surface.

Personally, I would set your longit height such that a floor would sit on the chine and the longits (it was probably already done that way) as the floor is a major structural part, triangulating everything. Certainly outer floors, from chine to inner longit, creating a triangular structural 'chine box', then a centre floor covering the tank, also glassed in to complete the floor structure right across the boat. Skin the ply used for the floor both sides first with 450csm.

All timber used at Phantom was primed/sealed with Bonda G4 and skinned with csm as full sheets, and stored that way, so all components for floors etc, were cut from sheet already primed & skin coated. if the raw edges are then taken care of during the build, it has the best chance of 'lasting'.

I would bed the longits, floors etc down on some Scott Bader Crestomer 1186pa having shaped the various bits of timber to fit snugly in the corners.

The chines on a Revenger are quite heavily reversed (turned down) so not too sure how I'd deal with that, as the floor will obviously sit on the high point of the chine and be well off the deck by the time it meets the topsides. 1186 would be quite heavy in that quantity (filling that cavity along that length) so maybe 1196pa would be better (much lighter paste). Crestomer aint cheap though. Will think on it.

http://www.scottbader.com/downloads/...ber%202009.pdf

JMHO.

[larby]

Brilliant, thanks very much for that Jon. I'm just on my phone at the mo so ill have a better read through later when I'm home.

Cheers, James

[larby]

Got a bit more done in some free time this afternoon...

First job was to clear the engine bay out, this was still as it was after i took the engine out. God knows who thought up the rigging but it was awful, everything was a tangled mess with pinched wires, unused stuff cable tied to other stuff and several leaky or kinked hoses!
Once all that was out i could give it all a good clean. By now there was a fair amount of oil, water, petrol and hydraulic fluid sloshing around in there!

I bought a sabre saw yesterday. Bet 40 squid I've ever spent!! I don't know how i managed without it! Within 5 mins i had the main bulk of the bulkhead out, quickly followed by most of the rest of it, leaving just the edges.

I started on the port stringer. God was it held in there! I cut along both sides, smashed the hell out of it, but it didn't budge! In the end I ground the top off and chiselled it in half to get it out.
Underneath was shed loads of water and oil. Not surprisingly all the glass was delaminating here too.

Ran out of time in the end, so didn't have a chance to get to the other side.
Pics coming right up...

James

[larby]

Ok...

Pic 1 shows the first stage of cutting the bulkhead out
Pic 2 is getting the rest of it out as far as possible!
Pic 3 shows the totally try layer of glass that covers the stringers. This is the bottom layer. Could well explain why it's all delaminating so much as further probing has shown there's the same dry layer of woven under all this mess.
Pic 4 shows nicely just how wet it was under the stringers. The bottom of the ply was rotten too. If you look just above the chisel handle you can see the stuff they put down for the stringers to sit it, but they never touched it.

[larby]

Moving on...

Pic 1 shows the first half of the stringer out. I cut down through it in front of the transom and behind the bulkhead so i could lever it apart. I can then cut the stubs out much easier.
Pic 2 shows the pools of water/oil underneath now both halves are out
Pic 3. If you look at the left hand side of the pool, you can see some of the hydraulic fluid had already formed a pool under the stringer. I've no idea how it got in there so fast, but it just goes to show how leaky it all was, the engine bay was totally dry & clean before i started any cutting!
Pic 4 shows how far I'd got by the end of the afternoon. Might not look much, but of you go back and compare it to a pic of how cluttered the engine bay was, you'll see what I'd been up against!!

Thats all for now! I'm really inspired to get on with this now, though i don't know if I'll have much time over the weekend to get much done.

Any comments (especially inspirational ones!) much appreciated!

Cheers, James